


(Kyber) Seeking Home in Every Star

by SEpupppupp (ForNought)



Series: pigs in space [2]
Category: Produce 101 (TV), Rainz (Korea Band), The Boyz (Korea Band)
Genre: Kidnapping, M/M, Star Wars AU, alternating pov, failed 'meet the parents', galactic slavery, ioi sister groups make cameos, obviously rainz and tbz are in this too but not tagged, smuggling rings, space witches, trying to get home
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2019-11-06 13:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 64,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17941019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForNought/pseuds/SEpupppupp
Summary: After receiving a garbled message that ex-rebel pilot Hyunmin took to be a summons back home to Corellia he gets separated from Haknyeon. On their way to get back home they get even more lost.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I have to start posting this now or maybe i will never get it done and posted lol

Abeloth was only a human on the edges of nothingness, existing in space which may have ceased to be once the Ones abandoned it. Before becoming Abeloth, the Mother was a human who realised how the ones she loved, the Father, the Son, and the Daughter went unchanged while she aged, telomares fracturing and withering with each repetition. The Mother was unlike the Family but she sought their knowledge of the Force, the ways in which they were omnipotent and immortal and understood the very essence of the galaxy. The knowledge and power of the Force was not for those who were not already attuned to the energy of the universe yet it had appeared that force sensitive individuals were dwindling in number. Jedi and Sith alike were all-but wiped out, followers of Potentium banished from convention, Aing-Tii and white current were unreachable for many species, and those on Tund were driven to extremes by their exploration of the Force. 

On a planet somewhere at the edge of time, on the cusp of things that existed and those that did not, neither within the galaxy nor without it, a priestess found herself awake and alone. She knew nothing and nobody. All around her were illegible scripts, carved into the walls and painstakingly scrawled onto the membrane-thin pages faded tomes, and she knew not how to read them but she understood the teachings simply by awareness. She knew of the Kwa and their travels as they educated beings on planets that knew nothing of space travel or the force. She knew of the downfall of the Kwa, their intentions used against them and their escape into devolution. 

The priestess knew that she had always been alone and in her lifetime no other sentient beings had existed within the crumbling temple yet she possessed knowledge of things she had neither heard nor seen. She knew nothing and yet she knew everything of the galaxy she couldn't reach. Her home was falling apart, cracks deepening by millennia and columns disintegrating to dust as the stasis of time eroded everything. But the priestess waited because she dreamt of a human who reached out to her from the far reaches of the stars.

The dreams were always incomplete and the priestess never met the human who would fall out of the blushing fatigue of the sky to greet her but she knew the human would find her and they would meet many more humans.

 

 

In the Core Worlds were young ones who had grown up hearing of a force in the galaxy which adhered all things to each other and repaired tears with its sublime presence. They also heard of how it was a thing of stories and that the galaxy existed this way simply because it was.

If all things existed because they existed the young ones were uncertain. What did it mean for the ways they were able to use their will to alter what they saw and even see deeper into the realm in which they lived?

As the young ones grew older they developed the ways they could interact with their worlds. They could acquire things by bending the will of others and they could possess knowledge of people and planets with only the barest awareness of how to detect them.

The young ones realised that they could do too much. It was not a knowledge that they should never have possessed but it was something they realised should have been shaped and refined with guidance. In order to use their abilities without harming the universe, without creating a need for the force to press together fragments of everything to make up for areas of damage, the young ones focused on looking outwards.

The young ones gathered in groups to divine where they could find guidance. They used their sensitivity to cast their senses out to the galaxy. They found more young ones like themselves and shared their knowledge as they sent two of their kind out to follow the paths that had been found through the fissures of the force.

They discovered a young one living wild with loth-wolves on Lothal, young ones proclaiming themselves witches of Woostri who sung their ceremonies to the sea, a pair of young ones lost alone in the barren mountains of Carlac sustaining themselves only on fragments of the Force. Until one day they ventured further than ever before, slowly journeying through wild space to find the priestess had made a friend from the stars.

 

The priestess was taken from her ruined temple with her friend from the stars and the young ones learnt to use the force as the Ones had before them.

 

At the very core of the galaxy the force drew more young ones with an even stronger pull. No matter where they had lived in the thousands of star systems all around they were torn from reality and through hyperspace as though they hadn't existed in the first place. 

Farmlands in rural Lothal. Gone. Core worlds smuggling ring. Gone. Slave traders in the mid-rim. Gone. Droid repair team hurtling between planets. Gone. 

The heart of the galaxy hummed with the pulse that threaded between them all to weave them all more tightly with the quilted plushness of existence. The same soft force which cloistered the young ones veiled them from everything they had been and known yet the frayed remains never forgot. 

The tears that were worn through existence linked the lives of the galaxy just as well as the threads. Even the holes in existence pulled taut enough to sift its young ones through its frayed weave.

 


	2. Red Dwarf Cosmos Shopping Experiences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Haknyeon realises that buying a gift for Hyunmin's parents after meeting them is a shade inconsiderate.

It had been three days since Haknyeon had met Hyunmin’s parents but he still wasn’t certain of himself and what he should do around them. They were gracious hosts even though they were surprised at seeing their son for the first time in years. Haknyeon was mostly left to his own devices as Hyunmin’s parents prodded their son for information about his absence. He had been gone for far longer than the amount of time he had spent on Lothal with Haknyeon. It made sense that if Hyunmin hadn’t had much contact with his parents while he was in the rebellion, there would be a time when the pleasantries and doting would give way to the grieving they hadn’t been allowed and the relief that their son was alive. 

Haknyeon hadn’t meant to overhear a moment so private but there was something odd about the layout of the house and he would have been disorientated even if he wasn’t searching for the bathroom in the dead of night. 

Even if Hyunmin had sent messages home, KT-GZ would have had to code them and they could have been held in disregard while Hyunmin’s parents tried not to think about the possibility of it being a hoax. A garbled message sent on an encrypted comm link halfway across the galaxy was all the hope that they had. And they were finally able to hold their son, hear his voice, and wonder about all the things that had changed about him while he was gone. 

Haknyeon hadn’t even been listening closely to the disbelieving sobbing - the wondering whether this really was the son that they struggled not to think of as lost - when KT-GZ beeped sluggishly. Haknyeon was still startled and hissed admonishments at the droid even as it led him to the bathroom. 

So Haknyeon wanted to do something nice and buy them a gift. He was grateful that he was able to share their son but he knew that he would never be able to do enough to thank them. But Hyunmin was supposed to be helpful as a guide around the shopping complexes on Corellia. 

“I don’t know where anything is,” Hyunmin pouted as he played with a child’s toy which buzzed and beeped obnoxiously as it flashed with dozens of colours. KT-GZ was equally unhelpful as it whistled in response to the toy. “There have been a lot of redevelopment since I’ve been gone. You should have just bought something when we were back home.”

Part of Haknyeon wanted to be pleased that even while they were in the place Hyunmin had grown up, their farm back on Lothal was home to Hyunmin. Unfortunately Haknyeon couldn’t appreciate that as his inconsideration was highlighted and he couldn’t escape the fact that he hadn’t even thought to buy a gift for Hyunmin’s parents before he realised that they only knew the whereabouts of one of their sons. 

Haknyeon hadn’t actually been expecting to meet Hyunmin’s parents properly seeing as Hyunmin hadn’t been able to stop going on about the second Prince of Corellia who had invited him to his birthday party. He had been very enthusiastic about explaining how he had a friend from old money and this was his way of secretly getting in contact. 

It had been three days since they arrived in Corellia and there was still no more communication from this friend than the initial invitation. Haknyeon didn't mind. He liked it better this way that Hyunmin wasn't being drawn into a trap. But getting to Corellia had happened a lot more quickly than Haknyeon had thought because of the invitation. 

There was barely a month between receiving the crackled signal from KT-GZ and scraping together what credits they had (borrowing even more than that to make up the deficit) and flying halfway across the galaxy and getting introduced to Hyunmin’s parents. Bringing a gift somehow didn’t factor into Haknyeon’s thought process.

“I forgot, alright?” Haknyeon muttered. “What if they don't like things from Lothal anyway? I'm a farmer. Things are a bit different on a planet which has an industry like flying. People here probably like fancier things.”

Hyunmin reached for Haknyeon slowly and wrapped his arms around him, which would have been very sweet if he wasn't still holding the noisy toy. Haknyeon hadn't realised that it would have to whack him so sharply as is spun and whirred shrilly. KT-GZ joined in on the fun by ramming into Haknyeon's heels while whistling. Hyunmin didn't seem bothered by any of this as he said, “I'm from here and I like you. You're plenty fancy.”

“I don't understand what you're trying to say.”

Hyunmin released Haknyeon sulkily and slapped his arm. “They love you just like I do. Well, not just like I do because I don't want anyone to love you the way I do but-”

“I get it,” Haknyeon replied quickly. Even now he felt shy. The crystal Haknyeon wore around his neck seared against his sternum whenever Hyunmin was too close and saying things which made Haknyeon feel too hot and exposed. 

The rocks Haknyeon found were pretty and fit together seamlessly if he pressed them together. He hadn’t been able to chisel them into a more refined shape no matter what he and his sister used so he gave up on making them smoother and clearer and returned to the other project he had to surprise Hyunmin. The reaction to the crystals the way Haknyeon had found them, set in the tight grasp of metal and suspended from lightweight chains for safekeeping, was worth everything Haknyeon had. Even better when Hyunmin was happy about how the stones matched up so well. The only problem was how it was always there, pressing heavily against his chest and feeling even denser at times like this. 

“Let’s go somewhere else,” Haknyeon said. The heat in his face was still rising and it wasn’t helped by Hyunmin quickly pecking him on the cheek as he dropped the toy back onto the shelf of products just like it. 

“I wanted you to relax and have fun,” Hyunmin said as they made their way out of the shop. A child with flat black eyes, onyx deep, set into translucent marine skin chirped happily at a friend who was stumbling into Hyunmin and Haknyeon’s path as they clutched at a boxed stormtrooper figurine and promised to share it if they could pool together credits to buy it. 

Hyunmin squeezed Haknyeon’s hand and whispered, “Can we-”

“No.” Haknyeon heard the same thing that Hyunmin had and maybe the odd flutter in his chest was something they both experienced but Haknyeon was all too aware of the paltry amount of credits they had. 

Flying halfway across the galaxy, forging identification for Hyunmin so that he could legitimately get here, it wasn’t cheap. They had to hold on to whatever they could. Besides, Haknyeon couldn’t afford to buy a present for Hyunmin’s parents, let alone buy dolls for adorable children he didn’t know. 

Hyunmin hadn’t said anything since they had left the toy shop though his hand hadn’t slipped from its clasp with Haknyeon’s it was still something which made Haknyeon worry.

"I'm sorry that we couldn't get that doll for those kids. If we had enough credits we could have bought something," Haknyeon said. "But I really want to buy a gift for your parents. They must already think I'm inconsiderate for not bothering before now."

Hyunmin's eyes widened and he pulled Haknyeon closer as they walked through the street. "Why are you sorry? It doesn't matter! We're not rich or anything. And my parents shouldn't mind that either."

Haknyeon frowned. "I still think I should find something for them."

"I don't think you should bother," Hyunmin sighed. "I tried to think of ideas as hard as I could but I have nothing."

Haknyeon didn't like the idea of that.

"You know them better than I do," Haknyeon said as he squinted at shopfronts. There were shelves upon shelves of mass-produced wares but Haknyeon didn't know whether any of it was good, nor whether it would suit the tastes of Hyunmin's parents. Things were different back home and there were only glittering shopping complexes in the capital cities. The market near the farm was mostly stocked with hand crafted merchandise which was often misshapen and rough and didn't last particularly long. But since the stormtroopers' increased presence over the past decade there had been more imports of their home-comforts from all the stars they hailed from. They were strange things to look at but Haknyeon didn't get to look too closely seeing as he never had much to spend. He was at market to work and he didn't even allow himself to become distracted by pilots in the streets who claimed they could sense a great skill lying dormant within him.

The only pilot Haknyeon found himself distracted by was Hyunmin, but that was partly because he couldn't trust Hyunmin not to wander off and get lost or pulled in by the same tricks that had Haknyeon losing credits and getting told off by his younger sister in the years before.

Even now Hyunmin was pulling at Haknyeon's arm and drifting far too close to a shop where the window was stuffed full of brightly coloured decorations and offers for all sorts of confectionery which was apparently lauded the best in the star system. KT-GZ beeped with ascending sounds of irritation but dutifully followed Hyunmin and Haknyeon over to the window when it became apparent that the droid was being ignored. With good reason too. The fact that the sign (written in a bold font of Aurebesh with smaller subtitles of the same exclamation in half a dozen other languages) didn't purport to be the best in the galaxy was interesting. It sounded a lot more honest than such a wild alternative and Haknyeon was curious. Perhaps it secretly was home to the best sweets and candies in the star system.

"Hyunmin, maybe--"

"No," Hyunmin said loftily. "I'm just looking. We need to get a present for my parents apparently. We'll just have to imagine how good all the things on the other side of this glass are."

Haknyeon turned away to hide his irritation. He wanted to at least try something. He knew it was petty to be jealous of the family leaving the shop, laden with paper parcels which were likely filled with the best sweets in the whole galaxy! For all Haknyeon knew the sign in the window was a simple modesty! The fizzing, brightly coloured orbs and stars and crystalline sugar structures were the best in the whole galaxy. He would have to eat it for himself to ascertain whether it was the case.

"Please, Hyunmin."

"No," Hyunmin said shaking his head gravely. "We must save everything we have to buy glassware which my parents will never use because it looks too fancy."

"No, Hyunmin! I don't want to buy a present that they wont even use!"

"You want to know what they like, don't you? They like the same things as any other old people."

Both of them were getting far too indignant to be dignified in front of the crowds of other shoppers, chattering in languages with far different cadences to what Haknyeon was used to. It was embarrassing all the same. If they were at least not squawking at one another in Galactic Basic they could pretend to be bickering over something else less silly. Even KT-GZ was edging away from the pair of them and was probably scoping the area for someone else to latch onto.

Haknyeon was aware that he should have had some shame but he folded his arms and even the chain carrying the crystal felt too warm against his neck as annoyance brimmed. "Don't call your parents old. What if their feelings are hurt by it?"

"Are you going to tell them? Are you going to tell on me to my parents because I called them old?"

"Why would I?" Haknyeon asked. "We're not children."

"You could have fooled me," Hyunmin retorted. And then confusion replaced the expression on his face. He grabbed Haknyeon's elbow and pulled him closer. But it didn't seem to be enough because someone else fell heavily into Haknyeon's side and muttered something gruff in a language which might have been the language Hyunmin sometimes muttered to himself in before merging with the crowd a few steps away.

The crystal hadn't fallen off its chain and Haknyeon wasn't hurt. He grinned up at Hyunmin as he righted himself but his comment about falling for him all over again petered to nothing when he noticed Hyunmin's frown deepen.

"What's the matter?" Haknyeon asked. KT-GZ whirred loudly but Hyunmin didn't pay it any mind.

"Check your pockets," Hyunmin instructed as he quickly did the same.

"What is it?" Haknyeon asked as he patted his pockets. The problem quickly became apparent even as Haknyeon cast his gaze about the ground for his wallet. There was no sign of the scuffed case or any of the credits that had been inside. "Oh no, it's all-"

Hyunmin set out at a sprint before Haknyeon could even get his head around what was happening.

"Wait, Hyunmin!" KT-GZ was only a few metres ahead, bleeping and whistling as it trundled after Hyunmin. Haknyeon could just about keep the droid in his sights as he ran after them both but he struggled finding opportune gaps between all the shoppers and their bulky purchases.

Haknyeon tried to listen out for KT-GZ as he ran. The droid was obnoxiously loud and distinctive enough at home on Lothal. Apparently lots of things made sounds similar to astromechs on Corellia. It made sense seeing as it was a planet of pilots and cargo logistics but the numbers served only to confuse Haknyeon further as he tried to guess which turns Hyunmin had made on his way through the shopping complex.

Haknyeon didn't know how long he had been running for but he was distinctly aware that he had no clue where he was. None of the shops around looked familiar. He slowed to a stop and tried to gain his bearings but nothing was certain. The ceiling was high above, a Fresco of dawn-lit clouds parting to make way for a fleet of starships, and all around Haknyeon there were more uniformed people of varying species laughing jocularly. And Haknyeon was alone and uncertain of what he was doing here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so this is the first actual chapter posted in line with my actual posting schedule!! so from now on i will try my hardest to update every second sunday and hope that the posts don't somehow catch up with where i am in terms of completed chapters hahahahahaha


	3. Haknyeon is Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A friendly passerby is far kinder than Haknyeon could have hoped for.

Haknyeon didn't want to prematurely declare himself as lost but he definitely didn't know where he was. He was in a strange place with nobody familiar and even if he could find his way out of this particular shopping complex he didn't know precisely where Hyunmin's parents lived.

He walked a while more as he tried to come to terms with things.

What Haknyeon was sure of was that a pick-pocket had struck and taken all the credits that he had, Hyunmin had abandoned him (well he had gone in pursuit of the pick-pocket but Haknyeon was feeling very sad and alone so it felt a lot like being abandoned regardless of reason), and he was very lost.

It didn't feel so premature to decide that he was lost when he was feeling tired and he just wanted to be at home napping while Hyunmin played with Sowmi and Piggly a bit too loudly for Haknyeon to actually get any rest. There had to be some way of finding Hyunmin soon. It couldn't have been very long in the grand scheme of things but Haknyeon even missed KT-GZ. They had almost been getting along together lately. Nobody would have guessed it but from time to time while Haknyeon was working in one of the barns KT-GZ would accompany him and help him out with his repairs. Haknyeon was going to miss all that time they spent together. It wasn't quite like losing a friend but it was all the familiarity that Haknyeon had here on Corellia aside from Hyunmin. Who had abandoned him.

Haknyeon kept walking and walking and still he didn't find Hyunmin. But he did find an exit and no matter how misguided a decision it seemed he walked through it and out into the ochre evening. The thing about Corellia was that outdoors, out of the carefully controlled air which was comfortable against the skin and carried the lightest scent that was curious but not unpleasant, the air was rough and ferrous. There were many mines all over the planet and the sky was constantly blotted with flocks of starships criss-crossing paths as they ventured starward.

Since arriving here and realising the odour wasn't unique to the spaceports here, Haknyeon had wondered why the air was so distinctly sour. It was something he would never grow used to and he was glad that he would only have to breathe air like this in the short-term. But Hyunmin had grown up on the exhausts and gases from mines and all varieties of ships. He had never mentioned the air on Lothal smelling like anything in particular and Haknyeon didn't want to ask if it meant admitting that he didn't like the air on this planet.

Haknyeon didn't like it but he had to breathe it in and try to feel like this was normal as he searched for signs that were in Aurebesh. He was peering up at a tall sign and attempting to work out whether he could understand what it said or not when a hand tapped at his shoulder. He turned to see a human around the same age as him smiling tentatively.

"Are you alright?"

"Not really," Haknyeon admitted. "I think I'm lost."

"Yeah," the human agreed. "You wouldn't be standing in the way of the freight entrance otherwise."

Haknyeon followed the human away from the alleged freight entrance but he couldn't even bring himself to feel embarrassed about it. He had reached a point of waifesque existence which removed him from such concepts as shame.

"You're not from here, are you?" The human asked over his shoulder. He had kind eyes and a slow gentle voice and Haknyeon decided that if he could feel ashamed or anything like that he would still be comfortable opening up to this person.

"I'm from Lothal. My name is Ju Haknyeon."

The human paused in step and turned to inspect Haknyeon more thoroughly. After a moment the human decided Haknyeon passed whatever metric the visual inspection was for and nodded. "Wow, that's really far. I'm Kim Sunwoo. I'm not from here either. I'm from Tralus but that's nothing compared to your journey."

Haknyeon shrugged. "That's not the part I am worried about."

Sunwoo laughed, eyes sparkling, and reached out to pat Haknyeon's arm roughly. "Alright. You're lost. Where are you headed? Home?"

"I have a husband," Haknyeon said. It felt weird even to himself to bring it up but the fact couldn't go without a mention when that was where he wanted to be. With Hyunmin. "I don't know where he went. He's a pilot. He's from here."

"Your husband left you?" Sunwoo asked in bemusement.

"Someone stole all my credits and Hyunmin -- oh, that's my husband's name, Hyunmin, he's really handsome so you'd know him if you saw him -- ran after them."

"He sounds like a very nice husband," Sunwoo said. The words came on the back of breaths which almost sounded like laughter but Haknyeon couldn't be sure of it. He didn't want to accuse someone who looked so closely at him, as though making sire to listen carefully to every word, of laughing but his ability to feel embarrassed had returned and that was what it felt like.

Haknyeon sniffed and then grimaced at the lungful of smelted air he had breathed in.

"What is it?" Sunwoo asked, definitely laughing.

"Nothing," Haknyeon said. Then, "Are you laughing at me? I really do have a husband and he's really good to me always. I would follow him anywhere in the galaxy... If I knew where he was."

Sunwoo continued laughing and Haknyeon wished he knew what the joke was.

"I will help you to find your husband," Sunwoo said breathlessly. "Where did you lose Hyunmin, Haknyeon?"

"Inside the shopping complex."

Sunwoo nodded and started walking. Haknyeon quickly followed. He had learnt his lesson and wasn't going to carelessly lose another person so soon. Sunwoo looked askance at him and smiled. "He's probably looking for you too. If we go back inside it will be easier for you to find each other."

It was a sound idea and Haknyeon knew it made far more sense than wandering aimlessly and feeling unhappy that the air was so strange on this planet and it was a shame that Hyunmin had to grow up with this instead of getting to run around where the air was fresh.

"Would it be bad if I tell him that I don't really want to come back to Corellia?" Haknyeon asked. Sunwoo gave Haknyeon a questioning look so he said, "Hyunmin. He's from here so he might be sad that I don't want to come back to his home again. He's lived with me for so long. It is really selfish of me that I just want to go back to that. He couldn't come here for a long time and I was so scared that he would leave me to return home when it was safe. I would hate it if he said something like that to me."

Sunwoo frowned and squeezed Haknyeon's shoulder. It was difficult to tell whether it was a comforting gesture or just Sunwoo pulling Haknyeon out of the way of some people walking the opposite way. Haknyeon decided that Sunwoo was nice so it was likely more comforting than anything.

"Has he said that he wants to come here often?" Sunwoo asked.

"Not really," Haknyeon replied. Everything inside the shopping complex looked the same yet different. Nothing about his surroundings was familiar and he wasn't fond of feeling so misplaced. "But he got really excited about being invited to his friend's party here. His friend is the Second Prince of Corellia. I would have really wondered who else would have the resources to try so hard to contact someone lost like Hyunmin but-"

"How long has he been lost for?" Sunwoo interrupted.

Haknyeon hesitated but it was not as though he had been able to keep his mouth shut until now. There was something very trustworthy about Sunwoo and Haknyeon wanted to be trusted too. So he was trying his hardest to let Sunwoo know about him well. "Hyunmin has been lost for as long as I have known him.”

Sunwoo didn't look much like he trusted Haknyeon. "He has been lost the whole time? How?"

"He came to Lothal by accident," Haknyeon said blandly. Perhaps he could never be trustworthy. He couldn't tell Sunwoo about Hyunmin's past as a rebel pilot. He couldn't tell Sunwoo about how he had nursed this stranger to health and hoped that he wouldn't live to regret it while trying to ignore the numerous insignia which were beacons for danger and a clear sign to the stormtroopers that Hyunmin wasn't ever fighting on their side. But to Hyunmin's family and friends and everyone who had ever known him before he landed on Lothal, he was lost. He had been lost for years and years and now it was Haknyeon's turn to learn what that felt like.

"He's a pilot and he landed on a planet by accident? Was he not very good?" Sunwoo asked.

"Hyunmin is the best! There isn't a pilot in the galaxy better than him!" Haknyeon asserted. Technically Haknyeon had never witnessed Hyunmin's skill and considering how their meeting had been the result of a crash-landing he should have assumed the inverse. But there was no way he could let someone think anything bad about Hyunmin. He probably was a brilliant pilot usually.

Sunwoo didn't say anything to that and Haknyeon wondered how much this human regretted offering to help him. Until someone else chimed in, "It sounds like someone is trying to steal your title. Sunwoo, what are you doing with someone who thinks they know a better pilot than any of us?"

Sunwoo stopped and it took Haknyeon a few moments to realise that their journey back through the shopping complex had reached a pause. Sunwoo's attention had been taken by two more humans who were sitting at a small round table outside a shopfront which sold drinks. Haknyeon couldn't read anything else about it aside from brand names which he had seen registered under the conglomerates which gathered with their headquarters in the core worlds.

"Who is your friend?" The larger of the two asked in a voice that was slow like Sunwoo's but seemed more docile than Sunwoo's somehow.

"This is Haknyeon," Sunwoo said. "He has a husband that he is trying to track down."

"That's so sad," the other of the two at the table commented. This was the one who spoke first, cheeks pressing into dimples even with the most neutral of facial expressions. If this person really did think that Haknyeon's situation was sad they would surely have looked more sympathetic about it.

"My name is Younghoon," the taller human said with a short wave. "This is Changmin. We work with Sunwoo at the courier agency."

"You're a pilot too?" Haknyeon asked. He squinted at Sunwoo's uniform accusingly and wondered whether the logo on the breast-pocket would have told him as much if he could read it. "How come you didn't tell me?"

Sunwoo shrugged. "You didn't ask. You just talked a lot about your husband."

"If I had a husband who ran out on me I wouldn't be able to stop talking about it either," Changmin (the skinny, dimpled pilot) sighed knowingly.

"He didn't 'run out' on me," Haknyeon said. "He was trying to help me."

"That's what they all say."

Haknyeon wasn't sure that he liked this Changmin person. They had only just met yet was insinuating that Hyunmin had intentionally left him.

"Hyunmin loves me," Haknyeon grumbled. "He wouldn't leave me. He was trying to stop the person who stole all my credits. All Our credits. I had all of our money for some reason."

"Don't worry," Changmin said with a lot more sympathy this time. "We've all been there. There are tons of petty theft rings around here. You will learn to keep your wits about you soon."

"If he has any." Another human joined them from inside the place Haknyeon took to be a pub. This person was also wearing the same uniform as the others. Haknyeon finally noticed the pattern in the jewel-coloured jackets with the same logo on the breast-pocket. The newcomer placed down three small cups of steaming orange liquid that smelled oddly like the air outside. "Oh, who are you?"

"I'm Haknyeon."

"We're helping him because he is lost," Sunwoo said despite that fact not ringing particularly true lately.

"He's been dumped," Changmin said sadly.

"Jaehyun." Jaehyun slid one of the cups towards Haknyeon. "I think you could use this more than Younghoon.

"Are you offering this person  _ my  _ drink?" Younghoon asked.

"Well I'm not going to give my drink to anyone," Jaehyun scoffed. With a wink at Haknyeon the cup edged even closer. "Chin-chin."

Haknyeon didn't drink and pushed the cup away. "Where do the thieves go after they take people's things?" Haknyeon asked.

"Home, I guess," Jaehyun shrugged.

"We mostly try to stay away from that sort of stuff," Younghoon added quietly. "I'm sorry that we couldn't be more help."

"I don't know what's actually happening but I guess I am sorry too," Jaehyun said before downing the drink previously offered to Haknyeon.

Sunwoo nudged Haknyeon and spoke in a low voice. "Your Hyunmin, he probably went to wherever he left you. Do you remember where that was?"

"I think it was a sweet shop," Haknyeon said. He definitely knew it to be the case but he didn't fancy the idea of outing himself as someone so thoroughly distracted by sweets in a window.

"Let's go and find your husband," Sunwoo said with a kind smile.

Somehow Haknyeon felt encouraged, like it really would be as easy as having a guide to take him to the place he had last seen Hyunmin. Before long they would be reunited and Haknyeon would be squabbling with KT-GZ all over again. It was really fortunate that he had found someone like Sunwoo.

Haknyeon was even trying to think about how lucky he was even as they waited outside the one place that did look familiar. Only this time Haknyeon's mouth wasn't watering as he considered how much he was allowed to spend while still retaining enough credits to buy a present for Hyunmin's parents. He didn't really want to give up on that goal but he would have to. No matter how much Hyunmin chased it was unlikely he would find the culprits in crowds like these. Haknyeon would have to try to seem like a better son-in-law in some other way.

"Are you sure this was the place?" Sunwoo asked.

"Yeah," Haknyeon replied. "I wanted all those sweets inside. Maybe I am a bit greedy."

He tried to keep talking about how much of a glutton he truly was but he couldn't even keep his brain on that one topic. Instead his brain was searching through the alternatives to Hyunmin coming to find him here. He didn't know this place well so he didn't know what sorts of things to expect, what was dangerous in a place less rural than he was used to. There was a very real possibility that something bad had happened. Haknyeon wasn't sure what it was that could have happened but he couldn't believe that Hyunmin had simply disappeared for no reason at all.

Hyunmin wouldn't leave Haknyeon. He wouldn't abandon him, especially not in a place unfamiliar to him, so something had to have happened to prevent them from meeting. But asking Sunwoo about it didn't make Haknyeon feel good. He didn't want to ask the opinion of someone who knew lots about the galaxy and have to hear responses such as Hyunmin being kidnapped for a ransom or sold off as a slave to the Hutts (of course Haknyeon had heard all sorts about that clan who lived in excess, too much money, too much power, and too many scary stories to go along with their presence for Haknyeon to be happy to recall them at a time like this) or any number of worse things. It might not be that bad really. Hyunmin may only have been beaten up by other small-time thieves with nothing better to do but Haknyeon didn't even want to think that something like that could happen to him.

But Sunwoo had his own business to be getting on with. That much was obvious by the way the timepiece was repeatedly withdrawn from a jacket pocket. He kept pressing at it and muttering to himself. Haknyeon wasn't even sure that Hyunmin was going to appear. 

Haknyeon needed a distraction. He cleared his throat and Sunwoo looked up from his device with a smile for Haknyeon. “Yeah?”

“What’s that?” Haknyeon asked.

“This?” Even Sunwoo looked confused as he held up the thin cuboid device. Haknyeon leaned closer to look at the ever-shifting lines of blue holograms. Sunwoo’s hand twitched but he didn’t withdraw it from Haknyeon’s sight. “It’s just my comm unit. Do you not have them on Lothal?”

There were comm units in Lothal, but Haknyeon had never had one because there had never been the need. His mum had one that they all gathered around to talk to Haknyeon’s older sister through, the crackling blue shape of his sister and her baby chattering happily about life in the capital city and how things are being rebuilt to provide a better quality of life in the aftermath of civil turmoil. Haknyeon could appreciate that the one at home was an older model but Sunwoo seemed to be communicating with someone in text and Haknyeon hadn’t known there were even ways of instantly sending short messages with comm units. 

“This looks really fancy. It looks like you can do lots of fun things with it.”

Sunwoo nodded. “Yeah. I can use this to talk to lots of friends at once even if I am in no real position to have a verbal conversation. Sometimes it is inconvenient so I can write things out with these buttons.”

Sunwoo showed Haknyeon all sorts of functions of the comm unit and even how it could project 3D maps and images into the air above it that could be manipulated physically. Haknyeon had never seen anything like it and he thought it would have been good to have something like this to help him to communicate with Hyunmin. He could have marked on a map where he was and sent it to Hyunmin so that they could find each other easily. But they didn’t have these so Haknyeon had to make do with waiting in the last place he had seen Hyunmin. 

And then it was time to leave. A pair of brusque-looking human-shaped droids arrived ushering shoppers out of the complex.

"But what about Hyunmin?" Haknyeon asked.

"You are a valued customer at Red Dwarf Cosmos shopping experiences, however we are now closing and must ask you to leave to return tomorrow for another wonderful experience. We look forward to seeing you again."

"Come on," Sunwoo said gently as he tugged on Haknyeon's arm. Between Sunwoo and the droids there was no choice but to leave the shopping complex. There weren't too many others loitering around but the people who were had droids firmly intoning the same message while advancing upon them.

Hyunmin hadn't come back for Haknyeon.

There must have been some reason for it and there must have been something that Haknyeon was forgetting which would reunite him with Hyunmin. He followed Sunwoo out of the shopping complex and tried not to panic. There must have been something. Hyunmin was nearby. Surely. Finding him again wouldn't be too difficult. Until they were back in the cloying smog outside and the sky was a bruised shade of steel and Haknyeon hated breathing it all in.

"Do you have any other ideas about where Hyunmin could be?" Sunwoo asked. The question was light but there was a strain in the words. Haknyeon already knew that he had been enough of a burden on this kind stranger who hadn't even asked for anything in return.

"I don't know," Haknyeon replied honestly. "But I will find him. Thank you so much for your help and good ideas. I wish I could do something for you in return."

"But we haven't even found him?" Sunwoo said. "We should still try."

"You don't need to," Haknyeon said. "Thank you. I am glad I could meet someone like you."

The strike to Haknyeon's shoulder left his arm tingling as it recovered from the momentary numbness. His head hadn't been hit but he was still dazed as he saw the hurt on Sunwoo's face.

"Why are you talking like this? Like you're going to leave? I am not going to just leave you when you have nothing," Sunwoo said firmly. "You have no credits and you have nowhere to go. How could I leave you?"

Haknyeon wanted to cry. Whether he wanted to or not his eyes were stinging and his nose was prickling with an itchy heat that only burned more as he inhaled the carbonised air. Haknyeon didn't really want to cry but he couldn't change the fact it was about to happen so he knew that he wanted to get it over with if this new friend was going to be so kind with no reason.

"Thank you," Haknyeon muttered pathetically. He wiped his nose on his wrist but he supposed he could come out of this even worse. He could have been crying like this because nobody wanted to help him rather than the inverse. "I really don't have anything that I could give you or do for you."

"You've told me enough about this Hyunmin person that I am completely invested in you finding him," Sunwoo grinned. There was nothing but kindness and Haknyeon didn't see anything wrong with accepting everything Sunwoo was giving and relaxing into the embrace that was all he had right now.

"You'd really like him if you met him," Haknyeon said into Sunwoo's shoulder. "He's really funny and cool. He'd be so happy that someone like you helped me to find him again."

"Would he like me?" Sunwoo asked. "The first thing I am going to do when I meet him is tell him off for running away from you."

"You should tell me off too," Haknyeon said as he slipped free of Sunwoo's arms. "I didn't chase him quickly enough."

"That's true," Sunwoo agreed. "But you're a bit pathetic right now. We will find you somewhere to rest and then when you've cheered up a bit I will tell you off for not running after Hyunmin quickly enough."

It sounded almost like a fair deal though Haknyeon wasn't sure what the conditions really encompassed. He followed Sunwoo to a shuttle stop and cringed at how his debt was monetary in addition to being emotional. He had really had too much from Sunwoo and he'd never be able to repay all of this kindness no matter how hard he tried. Haknyeon simply wasn't capable of things like that. But there wasn't anything that he could do until he had rested and had something.

The shuttle was sparsely populated with tired commuters and a family with chattering children.  Haknyeon closed his eyes and wondered how it was that so many different species communicated so differently. It made Haknyeon feel more lost, nowhere near the sounds he was used to at home, but it was something he could focus on to relax on the shuttle. These were the sounds that Hyunmin had grown up listening to. That was a nice thought. He was closer to getting to know what Hyunmin experienced.

When Haknyeon opened his eyes again he witnessed what must have been more of what Hyunmin grew up seeing. The world below was glowing orange, pulsating against the rough charcoal shapes that must have been alive with people on their way to work or to see friends as the day simmered into night. In the darkened window Haknyeon's eyes met Sunwoo's.

"This place is so different to home," Haknyeon said.

"Yeah," Sunwoo agreed. "Tralus isn't like this. All the worlds are so different."

Haknyeon hadn't been to many worlds but he could already tell that much. All the worlds were so different but then Haknyeon remembered how Hyunmin had talked of even deeper differences sitting beyond the surface of the planets. There was so much more to see that Haknyeon would never have seen. He wasn't like Hyunmin who had travelled between the stars and drawn portraits of the planets and the people who he met. He wasn't like Hyunmin who had lived too dangerously and contented himself with something almost mundane to preserve his travels with his astromech.

The closest Haknyeon would get to travelling to dozens of planets in the galaxy was to ask another pilot about it. So Haknyeon asked about Tralus and all the other places Sunwoo could think of and he tried to understand the words as best he could. Maybe he would never see these boiling oceans and glittering mountains and vast tundra that never ended and lakes of magma and worlds where the very air was sentient, but hearing about them was almost like doing all the things Hyunmin had done. It was almost like believing Hyunmin would soon be back for him.

Sunwoo and Haknyeon alighted at a cluster of white-walled buildings which didn't match the flat hue of the city. It was a resort. Haknyeon listened as closely as he could as Sunwoo explained how the spaceport had developed wider to accommodate the various travellers and pilots with facilities for gambling and entertainment and rest.

After walking through a bright white atrium of carved white stone, titanic pillars reaching up beyond Haknyeon's vision to compete with the veins of vines that latticed far above with sprays of colour decorating the deep green fibres, Sunwoo used a card to enter a corridor which wasn't so harshly white yet the walls were bright enough to make Haknyeon's eyes ache.

There were many doors in the corridor with signs that Haknyeon couldn't read. He wouldn't have managed in a place like this alone if there wasn't a trace of Aurebesh to guide him. All he had were the words of other people to rely on. A small spherical droid buzzed indignantly at Haknyeon and stumbled out of its way too late not to incur a spiteful shock from the droid before it raced away. Sunwoo didn't stop while Haknyeon checked his stinging shin and there wasn't time to feel sorry for himself.

"What is this place?" Haknyeon asked as he followed Sunwoo.

"This is a shortcut to the hotel," Sunwoo explained. "It's a shortcut to a good hotel anyway. No offence but you don't exactly look like you are a guest here."

Haknyeon didn't know what that was supposed to mean. He was wearing nice clothes. They were a bit plain but it was understated. He didn't want to arrive here and go shopping in trailing robes of Lothal finery (not that he had any) just to act like he belonged in places like this. He frowned. "Who is to say what a guest here looks like?"

"You just seem a bit rural," Sunwoo said quickly as though that would soften whatever meaning his words had.

"I'm a farmer. What's wrong with that?" Haknyeon asked.

"Nothing! It's just-"

Sunwoo didn't get to finish his explanation, which must have been a welcome relief, as one of the oddly marked doors in the corridors opened with a hydraulic hiss and two bickering humanoids burst out and stumbled right into Sunwoo.

"Oh," one of them chirped while approaching Sunwoo menacingly. "Where have you been?"

"Can't I go out?" Sunwoo asked.

The other humanoid slowly closed the door and squinted curiously at Haknyeon. "Who are you?"

Haknyeon wasn't entirely sure how to answer satisfactorily but Sunwoo took care of that for him. "He's a friend I made today. He's lost and he doesn't have anywhere to go. His name is Haknyeon."

"I'm Eric," the first of the newcomers chirped. "This is Hwall and he's my best friend."

"Am I?" Hwall asked with enough surprise that Haknyeon was sure this was the first time anyone had heard such a thing.

Eric looked sulky at that. "Of course you are. Don't you dare say I'm not your best friend or I will never speak to you again." It wasn't another moment before Eric brightened. "It is nice to meet you, Haknyeon, even though I am sure that Sunwoo is about to try to get all of us into trouble."

Haknyeon didn't quite follow. He was already lost and he had already cried so there was no shame in being honest about certain things. "What do you mean by that?"

A blocky droid which came up to Haknyeon's chest and was twice his width stopped its journey along the corridor once it reached their group. Lights flashed across its many faces before a distorted voice churned out words that Haknyeon couldn't understand. He understood the message in Galactic Basic Standard. "All personnel must present the required identification permitting their presence in this zone."

Sunwoo's eyes, as kind as ever sparkled with mischief as the droid repeated its request. "Run."

Hwall and Eric had already set off, shoving each other and giggling. Sunwoo grasped Haknyeon's wrist and pulled him down the corridor. Haknyeon was already tired but he couldn't lag behind now. He assumed he must have been the reason they were running in the first place.

Near the end of the corridor Eric and Hwall dodged into a side-corridor and Sunwoo pulled Haknyeon after them. Haknyeon could no longer hear the droid who had asked for identification but the chase still continued.

Another corridor and Haknyeon could no longer see the other two but Sunwoo was running at full-pelt, laughing all the while.

"Where are we going?" Haknyeon asked, his lungs burning more than they had been when he had been breathing the acrid air outside. Sunwoo glanced back only for a moment and kept pace as he pulled Haknyeon sideways into a doorway which hissed closed behind them, the metal sheets clanging together loudly.

The question was partially answered as Haknyeon looked at Hwall and Eric in the tiny room they had ended up in. Hwall and Eric were breathing heavily and grinning at one another.

"There's worse trouble for us to get into," Hwall laughed. They elbowed each other and Sunwoo laughed as they all relaxed from the run with relief. Haknyeon sagged against the wall, his legs barely able to hold him up after the day that hasn't made any sense. He crumpled to the ground when it started to move. The floor was moving and Haknyeon's heart had stopped moving at all.

"Are you alright?" Eric asked, crouched in front of Haknyeon and scrutinised him. Haknyeon supposed he wasn't dying. That was fine. Haknyeon nodded and Eric smiled at him. "Oh, good. We're going a few floors up so we can stop running now."

"Right," Haknyeon said. "And why is that?"

"Hiding, I guess."

"You're going to need somewhere to stay," Sunwoo said. "At least for tonight. We can find your husband tomorrow."

"You lost your husband?" Hwall asked. "A person?"

Haknyeon found himself nodding again and Sunwoo explained to yet more people what had happened to Haknyeon. It was strange hearing the events like this. That Haknyeon, after travelling across the galaxy, was robbed and his husband had gone in pursuit of the thieves. It sounded as though it had happened to someone else. Eric and Hwall had all the right reactions but it still didn't feel quite right.

The door to the tiny room (which would make more sense as a large elevator) opened, a quick swish which startled Haknyeon, and Eric offered a hand to help him up.

"Sunwoo was good to bring you here," Hwall said quickly. We'll be able to help you out."

"It might take some time but we can help you to find your husband," Eric agreed. "We know a guy."

Haknyeon didn't know what such a statement would mean but it soon became apparent what it meant. There were more corridors to walk through with swirling stone floors which made each footstep echo but eventually they reached a long narrow storage room filled with piled linens. The smell of the sheets cloyed in bubbles at the back of Haknyeon's throat and he tried not to worry about too much. He followed his three new friends -- apparently they were all pilots in a sense, they all flew on starships as various forms of crewmembers -- to the very end of the long room where they heard a flurry of movement and a pained clang and they met yet another human who jumped up from a low shelf where they had been lounging comfortably.

"Are you alright?" Eric laughed while crouching to prod where this person was clutching their head and wincing.

"I'm fine. You should have given some sort of signal that it was only you."

"Don't say that as though you're not excited to see me," Eric pouted while prodding harder as the human squirmed away in a post-nap haze.

"I'm never excited to see you. You only come to me when you need something."

"That's not true, Sangyeon," Hwall protested.

"It isn't?" Was the disbelieving reply. Sangyeon glanced at Haknyeon but didn't address him with the next question. "Why are you here now?"

Eric hesitated. And Sunwoo answered instead. "We need a room for my friend. Just for tonight but he needs somewhere to stay."

Sangyeon gave Haknyeon a long look before grinning at Sunwoo. "You lot are always trouble."


	4. Hyunmin the Rebel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hyunmin reconnects with old friends.

Hyunmin knew that he needed to be much more careful than he was but he knew the sorts of tricks that led to Haknyeon being shoved into him so gracelessly. He knew exactly how many bundles of credits or loose jewellery, or even comm units and chips and documents could be dislodged from a person with the right kind of push. Hyunmin had used such tactics himself but he wasn't about to let Haknyeon fall victim to something like that and lose everything they had.

Haknyeon had all of their credits and their passes to return to Lothal and in an instant that had all been taken from them. But Hyunmin had always been quick on his feet. He remained hot on the heels of the thieves as he weaved through the crowd. KT-GZ must have picked up some things from Hyunmin in all their years of working together. Even if the astromech was accustomed to a more legitimate existence  it had the same disregard for their surroundings as they gave chase.

He had softened after a lifetime of domesticity, of parenting pigs and using every opportunity he had to tell Haknyeon that he loved him, but he was still swift. He stumbled into a few more people and droids than he wanted to but he ran and ran, only looking behind to check for KT-GZ, and followed the hooded figure through the shopping complex.

Hyunmin had a sense for these things. He had always been good as the thief and he could be good as the pursuer too. A few twists and turns weren't enough to throw Hyunmin off and even without KT-GZ whistling suspicions at him he realised how he was being drawn in. There was an accomplice (of course it was common practice to work with someone else who could steal attention and disrupt a chase should there be any trouble) but Hyunmin wasn't going to be distracted by something like that.

The accomplice approached at a light jog on the outskirts of the corridor, sticking near the tall glass windows, a perfect reflection of Hyunmin's pace, but they hadn't come close enough to the pick-pocket that they could have exchanged any goods. Hyunmin's legs burned and his chest ached but he followed that same target even out of the shopping complex and through the dusty street of the city.

The roads were filled with the hum various shuttles and the growling engines of private transports. Hyunmin could almost have found his distraction but he kept on with the chase even as it took him somewhere far more familiar than it should have been. The small side street leading to a staff entrance for cargo loading was the wrong turn for the pursued to take but it was fortunate for Hyunmin to watch the person trip and skid across the ground. Hyunmin was upon the person at once and tore off the hood right before he was dragged off his target. But he had already seen enough.

"Sunghyuk?"

The hands pulling Hyunmin away faltered and he used the moment of hesitation to twist in the grip. He didn't know where to look, where would have been filled with more truth though both of these people were telling him the same thing. KT-GZ's squealing didn't help him in any way. These weren't just any thieves. Sunghyuk dusted himself off from the ground and frowned at Hyunmin. He approached slowly as though Hyunmin was a threat. If Hyunmin was a threat he would have done far worse to Daehyeon than lie in a heap on the ground and be a nuisance to drag away from Sunghyuk.

"This can't be right," Sunghyuk muttered slowly as he got closer. He looked thinner than he always had, hollow cheeks and his jaw more pronounced and Hyunmin tried not to worry. This might not have indicated the worst. He might not have had to steal like this just to survive. At least not if Daehyeon was still working with him. His gaze kept flickering to Daehyeon but Hyunmin didn't want to confirm how things were just yet. He couldn't look at Daehyeon and see such differences in him too and be fine with the way things were.

"Are you Hyunmin?" Sunghyuk asked. "Are you really our Hyunmin?"

There wasn't a clear-cut answer to that. Hyunmin hadn't been one of them for too long. Hyunmin had been Haknyeon's only for maybe more than three standard years, it was a shade longer, closer to four years on Corellia, but even before that Hyunmin had been the rebellion's Hyunmin since he had been Sunghyuk and Daehyeon's Hyunmin. But even with thoughts like that, he was looking at his Sunghyuk.

"Yeah." Hyunmin's voice cracked and he didn't know whether it would be alright for him to check over Sunghyuk to see if he was hurt. Daehyeon must have wanted the same, fists tight in Hyunmin's jacket, but he had been frozen to the spot without being able to do anything. Hyunmin simply didn't know what to do or how he was supposed to act at a time like this. He breathed slowly and tried not to panic anyone. KT-GZ wasn't the best at being subtle but it was enough that the droid could confirm that there were no injuries beyond a scrape or a bruise. Hyunmin finally glanced over his shoulder and tried not to laugh too obviously at the twisted shock and relief on Daehyeon's face. He looked mostly the same as always, strange expression aside, and Hyunmin couldn't keep his joy in any longer.

"Is this how you greet an old friend?" Hyunmin laughed. Daehyeon gaped wordlessly before burying his face in Hyunmin's shoulder. Sunghyuk was less taciturn about his reaction.

"We thought you were dead! We all thought you had died, you idiot," Sunghyuk wailed as he wrapped Hyunmin and Daehyeon in his arms. "I'm really going to kill you, you idiot. Are you really Hyunmin? Do you remember us?"

"You'd threaten to kill me before checking that I remember you?" Hyunmin asked. "You're definitely the Sunghyuk I always knew."

"I hate you," Sunghyuk grumbled as he squeezed tighter. "How can you... Eunki always told us that we were wrong, that you wouldn't die. He's going to be insufferable when he finds out that he was right."

"Maybe we shouldn't tell Eunki," Daehyeon said, voice muffled in Hyunmin's shoulder but still not enough to entirely obscure his words. Hyunmin's breath caught in his chest and he didn't know what he was supposed to do now. This was almost the touching reunion he thought he would never get -- not that he was unhappy with how things had turned out. He loved Haknyeon with everything that he had and he was happy to know him, happy to have him and to have given himself to Haknyeon in return -- but he should have known how moments like this soured too easily. Even with the starship factories on Corellia sent up as satellites the air quality hadn't completely recovered. The planetary repulsor beneath the surface could have been the reason the air was always like this, cursing all things to turn out badly when Hyunmin was here, but the legend of the five brothers hadn't mentioned anything like that. It was only Hyunmin's own bad luck.

He tried not to sound too pathetic when he said, "You don't want to tell Eunki about me?"

Hyunmin didn't have favourites (not until he met Haknyeon and then Haknyeon became his firm favourite) but by that merit he didn't have people he favoured the least, so it would only be unfair to Eunki for him not to know that he had been correct about Hyunmin being alive all along. Or Hyunmin really missed Eunki a lot and thought of him almost daily as the way to remind him that he was missing Kiwon, Seongri, Wontak, Sunghyuk and Daehyeon. It had been Eunki that triggered everything that had led Hyunnmin to where he was right now and it wouldn't have been right for Hyunmin to try to go on with his life without wondering whether he and their other friends were living well.

"Of course I don't want to tell Eunki," Daehyeon grumbled. He sighed, warmth that spread over the back of Hyunmin's neck but the chain that held the crystal that matched with Haknyeon's remained decidedly cold against Hyunmin's skin. Daehyeon gripped tighter. "We would never hear the end about his great lineage giving him such wonderful powers. You'd get the worst of it. We need to hide you and Seongri and Wontak can take turns in feeding you. You can hide in Kiwon's room. He probably wouldn't mind."

"He would mind!" Sunghyuk giggled. "He wouldn't be able to keep a secret like that away from Eunki."

"You think he wouldn't even be able to try?" Daehyeon asked.

There was something else. Hyunmin wasn't just bothered by the way his friends were merrily having this conversation without him. There was something dense and cold in his chest. Or on his chest. Hyunmin struggled to squeeze out of Daehyeon and Sunghyuk's embrace but they loosened their grip on him when he tried to shake them off.

"Where are you going?" Daehyeon asked uncertainly. "You can't leave now when we've just found you again."

It took a moment but Hyunmin somehow hadn't considered people who knew him so well wouldn't know this about him. This was big enough that they should have known it. It was a complete part of Hyunmin by now, this fact and presence that he was immensely proud of. "I need to get back to Haknyeon. He's waiting for me."

Sunghyuk and Daehyeon exchanged looks of confusion before Daehyeon managed a hoarse, "Who is Haknyeon?"

It wasn't a so easily answered question. Perhaps if this day had happened several years in the past, when Hyunmin had seen these friends every day and shared every part of himself with them without a second thought, he could have plainly said things as they were. But time had elapsed between them and there was so much that must have happened to them that Hyunmin didn't know about either. Neither of them had ceased to exist when they weren't seeing each other, but Hyunmin was uneasy about this part of himself that everyone should have known. Hyunmin felt uneasy about the fact that these people were not the people who would have known everything about how happily he was spending his days with the person he loved most in the universe.

KT-GZ trundled over the Hyunmin over the uneven ground and whistled loudly at Hyunmin. He knew. He just didn't think that a day like this would have come to him. He couldn't smile the way he normally did, brimming with pride about the fact that he had carved his own happiness in a completely new place.

"I'm married," Hyunmin said carefully. "Haknyeon is my husband."

Daehyeon grasped at Sunghyuk, almost desperate in the way his knuckles blanched. "You're married?" Daehyeon asked. "What do you mean by that? How can you be married?"

"I love someone," Hyunmin said. "His name is Haknyeon and we have been living together for a long time. I need to go back for him."

Sunghyuk looked entirely uncomprehending but he nodded his head all the same and patted Daehyeon's arm. "Alright. Let's go and find this husband of yours. You're not busy today are you? You have a lot of people to meet again."

The three of them made their way back into the shopping complex and Sunghyuk kept up a constant stream of questions about Haknyeon while Daehyeon trailed behind quietly and muttering to KT-GZ to leave him alone when the droid expressed concern about him being left behind. Sunghyuk was at least interested in how Hyunmin met Haknyeon, where they lived and how they had been going along like this for so long. He asked a lot of questions but barely gave Hyunmin enough time to give all the answers that he wanted to. By the time they arrived at the sweet shop where Hyunmin had parted ways with Haknyeon he had given as much explanation as he could even with all the omissions that were caused by yet more questions from Sunghyuk.

Sunghyuk at least mentioned how surprised he was that Hyunmin had been the first of the group to settle down and it made sense. Sunghyuk and Hyunmin had been trying to enjoy their youth as best they could even with the situation as it was, danger all around and being sent out on missions in ships to blow up power supplies to factories and government buildings serving the First Order and making the most of what little time was afforded to them. But Haknyeon had found him and kept him safe and there was a better way for Hyunmin to spend his days. He was going to make the most of all the time he had with Haknyeon and fill every moment with the happiness of being together with him. But it was difficult to do so with Haknyeon glaringly absent.

"Where is he?" Sunghyuk asked brightly, craning his neck as though he expected Haknyeon to materialise from thin air. "Where is your husband, Hyunmin? I want to meet him."

The request set Hyunmin on edge somehow, though he already knew exactly how Sunghyuk was. It was not as though he was hiding Haknyeon from view just to surprise Sunghyuk with a person who may or may not have existed.

"KT," Hyunmin said as he crouched down before his astromech. "Can you scan the area for him? I know it is difficult to with so many people around but he can't have gone too far."

KT-GZ was irritated by the question and made sure to let Hyunmin know with a jolt of electricity which Hyunmin admitted he deserved. "I know I should have said something when I went running off but I wasn't thinking about that. I didn't think Haknyeon would disappear."

Hyunmin belatedly remembered the circumstances and glanced up over his shoulder at Sunghyuk as KT-GZ babbled away in agitation. Hyunmin wasn't sure how intelligible the droid was, especially when he thought about how there was an underlying dialect in the binary beeping these days. He turned back to the droid and held it in his hands, the metal casing vibrating. Hyunmin didn't mean to overwork his astromech or cause it any distress but it had been with Haknyeon as long as Hyunmin had. It knew what the circumstances were like. "I will deal with that later. For now, I just want you to help me to find him, KT. Does... Does it not work like that?"

KT-GZ wailed and Hyunmin was glad he didn't have to attempt to understand that in any sort of language. It was bad enough that he could understand that his request had been denied. But back on Lothal KT-GZ had been so dependable when it came to retrieving objects and pigs and even Haknyeon. The droid had an uncanny ability for locating Haknyeon, often telling Hyunmin to stay put while declaring intent to search for him alone. Hyunmin didn't see how this would be any different.

"Please, KT," Hyunmin mumbled as he held tighter to the droid and pleaded the best he could. "We'll just do it the hard way if you can't, but I don't want you to run out of charge now. If there is an easier way of finding him by just scanning the area we won't have to travel so far."

KT-GZ whistled and Hyunmin already knew that both options were beyond what the droid was currently capable of. "That's fine. Stay close to me then. I can't lose you too."

"Hey," Sunghyuk said, shaking Hyunmin's shoulder quickly. "We should head to the base."

"I need to find Haknyeon," Hyunmin protested as he climbed to his feet. The shopping complex was vast and Haknyeon might even have travelled to a different floor by this point. There was no way of knowing.

"Why don't you just call him with a comm unit?" Daehyeon asked. Hyunmin wondered how unintelligent he seemed if even his friends from before would assume this was a solution he couldn't think of himself.

"Do you not think that I wouldn't have already tried that?" Hyunmin asked.  There was never any need on Lothal to use anything that wasn't already installed in a transport because the way they lived was planned with such precision that any absence was already calculated and Hyunmin could simply play with Sowmi and Piggly and tell them about all the things they could do together when Haknyeon returned from market with his sister. "We don't have any."

"We need to hurry," Sunghyuk said as he linked his hand with Hyunmin's. "Eunki is waiting for us now. He will be really excited to see you."

"What do you mean by that?"

Sunghyuk tugged at Hyunmin's arm despite the way Hyunmin tried to hold his ground.

"Come on! Don't you want to see everyone else?"

Of course Hyunmin did want to see all of their other friends, all the people he had known for so long, but the situation wasn't so easy. It didn't make sense that Sunghyuk wouldn't have considered that, especially not after all of the questions he had asked about Haknyeon and what it was like living with him.

"I need to find Haknyeon," Hyunmin said. But Sunghyuk didn't care.

"You're here, aren't you? Shouldn't you just hurry up and come along with us? You'll really disappoint the others if you don't come to see them now. Besides, we can find your husband later with everyone else. Tell him, Daehyeon."

Daehyeon pressed a firm hand on the back of Hyunmin's shoulder and began to lead him along with Sunghyuk. "It will be easier to track him down with more people. Everyone will help you. We just need to go and see everyone else first."

Hyunmin couldn't think of how to argue his point but even KT-GZ started rolling in the direction Sunghyuk was trying to lead him in. This wasn't giving up. Hyunmin would be back to meet Haknyeon and take him home. But this was the reason they had arrived here.

Daehyeon brought them to the small domestic ship that Hyunmin hadn't seen for far too long. The exterior was scraped and scuffed from too many near-misses and Hyunmin didn't miss how bumpy of a ride any journey was in the thing, but it was a part of a home that was everything he had. He boarded with KT-GZ, told the droid it was nothing to be so nervous about, and made sure he was secured safely in a seat. He wasn't taking the same risks he had in the past which had left him with bruises and even in one case a sprained wrist. It wasn't a safe vehicle at all.

Sunghyuk grinned at Hyunmin and this was almost like old times. This was the way things always had been when they ventured between the place the group had made their base and anywhere else they were instructed to go. They were young and it was all so much like playing, and even when some of them officially became rebel pilots, fighting for a democracy in the galaxy which had been missing for so many decades that none of them could even have hoped to remember what this alleged freedom was like, they still kept their old base far from the cities.

The journey was only an hour or so, though it helped that Daehyeon was the most reckless of the pilots of the ship as he flew too high in the atmosphere and the fixtures and fittings of the ship rattled loudly enough to blot out KT-GZ's protesting about being on board. They landed on a field surrounded by green hills. The air was always fresher out here though Hyunmin never noticed the difference in quality until he was out here, far even from the small villages in the area, and his chest felt so much fuller and it was easier to breathe. Though it wasn't quite the same as always.

Hyunmin couldn't breathe quite as easily as he normally could with this tight knot of worry winding and tangling itself larger and larger. The obstruction would be gone soon. He'd make his friends happy by visiting and they would help him to find Haknyeon. It was fine. He could bring Haknyeon back here and introduce everyone on the way that had been intended. Haknyeon had been so curious about the invitation that Hyunmin had received. He had been so uncertain of what Hyunmin told him about an old friend who might or might not have been from a noble bloodline (it mattered not whether the bloodline was of Corellia itself or Tralus because the title was claimed in jest all the same) and he had been nervous that this could be a trap. But Hyunmin was nobody, he was barely a person and he was simply an atom in the rebellion which could do nothing without the rest of the forces at work to help him and tell him what to do for their greater purpose. There was no way that the invitation would have been a trap to lure him in for some purpose he was too blind to see and it would be great to show Haknyeon that much.

Sunghyuk patted Hyunmin's back when he disembarked and Daehyeon laughed for the first time since they had met again.

"Welcome home, Hyunmin."

It almost felt like home but Hyunmin couldn't believe how things had remained the same in his absence. The air was fresh and the scenery was green but this wasn't the farm. This wasn't what Hyunmin had grown to love. KT-GZ agreed. Daehyeon was having trouble ignoring the astromech's complaining but Sunghyuk was able to ignore the droid with ease as he linked arms with Hyunmin and led him to the base of the nearest hill where the door to their base had always been located.

Inside the tunnel it was dim aside from the strip of lights across the ceiling. KT-GZ clearly didn't find the arrangement sufficient and lit its own path with a narrow beam of bright light which made spots dance in Hyunmin's vision if he looked for too long. The astromech was never happy and no matter how much it complained now it would be back to taking issue with every instance back on the farm where it might get passed over for attention in favour of Piggly.

"Everything looks the same so far," Hyunmin said as they reached the end of the earthen tunnel.

"How would we have changed anything?" Daehyeon asked. "We've all been struggling with the way things are."

Hyunmin wanted to ask but he didn't want to know the answer. He didn't want to hear just how much his friends had been struggling or why. It could have been something that he could have helped them out with or it could have been something that Hyunmin could have simply stuck with them through it. It was already enough that he had noticed the austere circumstances his parents had fallen into even with their eldest son connected to money and local government, but he hadn't been with them for a while. He loved his parents but they hadn't been the people he had risked everything with for years and years.

So Hyunmin kept his mouth shut and smiled tightly as Daehyeon opened the door. It creaked as it slowly slid upwards and even as Hyunmin winced he remembered that this was the way things had always been. The cylindrical astromech that rammed into Daehyeon's shins as soon as the door opened was a new addition.

"D0-1, leave me alone," Daehyeon groaned as he rubbed at his bruised legs. The astromech didn't pay him much mind and twirled around Daehyeon before encountering KT-GZ and beeping curiously.

While there was a break from KT-GZ's complaining Hyunmin looked about the base, still mostly dim with earthen walls lit with intermittent strips of white LEDs. The main room wasn't very large but away from the many doorways spaced in the round walls there was enough room for the round tables with rusted legs and small stools positioned around them and at the far end was the 'throne': a chair perched upon a twisting pile of old ship parts, and in it sat Eunki himself.

Eunki didn't look in the direction of the door for a long time. It was Wontak who approached first and peered at Hyunmin as though he didn't believe that Hyunmin was anything more than a hologram. He reached out slowly and the pressure of his hands around Hyunmin's shoulders increased gradually until the fabric of his jacket was bunched thickly in Wontak's hands.

"Are you really Hyunmin? Are you really alive?" Wontak asked.

"Yeah," Hyunmin said. He hated how now was when his voice got caught in his throat and he had nothing to say that Wontak would accept as an explanation for disappearing in the way that he had.

Wontak was the one right there with Hyunmin when he couldn't do what he was meant to and intentionally veered off-course to avoid confrontation with the Tie-fighters of the First Order. Wontak was the one left behind the night after hearing everything that Hyunmin had confessed when he'd woken him with tears tried on his face and Wontak peering at him nervously in the light shone towards the bunks by T8-D0. And Wontak was there again, clutching at Hyunmin and looking clueless.

“I’m sorry,” Hyunmin muttered even though he knew it wasn’t enough. He’d escaped and given himself a lifetime of being able to forget. Wontak was left behind, strong enough to do what he was supposed to and stick with the people that had given him a chance in life. 

Hyunmin waited for some sort of scolding but instead Wontak pulled Hyunmin closer in his arms. 

“You're back,” Wontak said, strength in the grit of his teeth that Hyunmin could only aspire to. “All that matters is the fact that you're back.”

Hyunmin could think of several more things that mattered more than his return but this was forgiveness and he'd take it even without being sure that he was deserving of it. Wontak slapped Hyunmin on the back and pulled out of the hug. It was way too easy and Hyunmin couldn't quite bring himself to smile back at his friend even in the familiarly dim light of the base. This had been a home to them for so long, it had been somewhere Hyunmin could return to and felt that he belonged more than anywhere else, but the air was dingy and it seemed to be able to conceal all manner of things aside from Hyunmin's own regrets.

Wontak didn't mind Hyunmin's uncertainty and led him back through the round room to the throne. Eunki was at ease, fiddling with a hand-held device and concentrating fully on that alone. As though Hyunmin wasn't there at all. And Hyunmin wondered if that was how things should have been.

"Eunki!" Wontak called. There was no reaction and Wontak continued, "A friend has come back to us after all this time."

Eunki did look over then but only to shrug and return to whatever had occupied him before. Wontak chuckled and squeezed Hyunmin's shoulder. "He's just sulking because he's missed you. We should show you around in case you've forgotten where everything is."

Hyunmin wordlessly followed Wontak as he and Sunghyuk chatted together about the things that had changed since Hyunmin had last been here. It had been a while before the mission Hyunmin ran away from that he had been back to the base with his friends. He had been stuck with the rebels mostly, trying to match their tempo and keep up with them on the various planets he'd had to travel to with them for missions that he should always have thought of as his last. But that wasn't the thing that bothered Hyunmin about his prolonged absence and the very minor changes.

The message Hyunmin received was from Eunki. He knew it was. Eunki was proud of his bloodline on Talus and had taken well to his regal nickname which had been something of a sore point when he had first pledged himself to the rebel alliance. It was a part of Eunki and something familiar that would have worked well to summon Hyunmin from the depths of space to return to him. It had worked well enough that Hyunmin had dragged Haknyeon here with him. And Eunki's cold reaction to him appearing didn't fit with that at all.

Haknyeon had fretted that this was a trap of sorts, that Hyunmin was somehow important enough to be tracked down like this and lured to the star system he remembered the best. It wasn't the case but it was certainly odd that the person who must have reached out a signal for Hyunmin ignored him when he appeared.

But maybe it wasn't good to dwell on things like that, things like Eunki apparently having faith that Hyunmin was alive and disregarding him when the theory proved to be true. There were other people to reunite with and Hyunmin couldn't help but laugh at how Kiwon's jaw dropped at the sight of Hyunmin.

"What is this?" Kiwon asked throughout his inspection of Hyunmin. "What has happened to me that I am imagining Hyunmin here after all this time?"

Hyunmin couldn't remain firm against the tickles as Kiwon prodded at him and asked whether he was really Hyunmin. It was too much like old times.

“I really missed you,” Hyunmin told Kiwon when he’d finally stopped trying to dig his fingers into Hyunmin’s ribs. Kiwon smiled and ruffled Hyunmin’s hair. It wasn’t enough. Hyunmin should have been able to say more without the sharpness in his chest because he felt sorry that this wasn’t a place where he still belonged. 

Kiwon had set up a reception room of sorts with a low window looking out into the verdant valley in which the base sat. It was nice, Hyunmin supposed, something that he and Haknyeon could do back at home if they had someone to invite over. There was a small table set up and soft seating with deflated cushions which must have been salvaged from somewhere that Sunghyuk, Wontak and Daehyeon perched on, watching Hyunmin even though Hyunmin had very little of interest to say. He had missed them all but he would much prefer being able to introduce Haknyeon to everyone.

“I need to find Haknyeon. He’s lost and I am worried about him,” Hyunmin said.

Without any more information than that Kiwon nodded, somber comprehension settling over his face. He rested his hand on Hyunmin’s knee. “We can look for your friend soon. Before that, Seongri needs some help. I sent RO-81 with a message for him so he’s probably already hoping that you’ll help.”

Hyunmin frowned. It already seemed as though he couldn’t correct Kiwon about his friend. Seongri really was another friend and Hyunmin wouldn’t have felt right leaving him in the lurch. But it didn’t seem right to think of a way to agree when Kiwon said, “We have a job for you.”


	5. Haknyeon in Corellia

“Haknyeon,” Eric said cheerily. He leaned against his broom and smiled down at Haknyeon as though he had just happened to see him and had not been pretending to sweep up the hotel foyer until he reached Haknyeon at one of the waiting areas. 

Haknyeon looked away from the windows, looking out for Hyunmin to miraculously know where he is and walk up the main drive to come and collect him. He supposed he had been here for a few days and nothing much had changed. A few moments looking away to indulge Eric yet again wouldn’t hurt. Well, there would be no consequences for Haknyeon, Eric’s employment was in dire risk if it depended on excessive sheen of the bright white stone ground he’d polished up on his way to Haknyeon. 

“Are you going to sit down,” Haknyeon asked. 

Eric quickly shook his head. “I’m not allowed. I’ll get into trouble,” he grinned. He didn’t look worried about getting into trouble.

“I don’t want you to get into any trouble,” Haknyeon said. 

Eric, along with Sunwoo, Sangyeon, and Hwall would likely get into lots of trouble if Haknyeon's existence in the hotel was discovered. He wasn't a guest who could pay and for the past few days he had moved through the resort by avoiding the service droids and following his friends with legitimate reasons to be there so that he could pretend to blend in. But whatever trouble these friendly people could get into, Haknyeon didn't want to exacerbate things. Eric grinned at Haknyeon and nudged his foot with the toe of his equally scruffy boot.

Eric seemed like he didn't belong here either but he was still different to Haknyeon.

"So, Haknyeon," Eric said. "You said you're from Lothal, right?"

Just hearing the name of the planet made Haknyeon's chest ache. He felt so empty on this planet where the air was too thick for him to breathe comfortably. It was fine within the artificially conditioned walls of the resort where guests were afforded the luxury of something smooth against their lungs, but on the occasions when Haknyeon could sneak past the droids and cameras that patrolled the area he found himself all-but choking on the ferrous shards of air scraping his insides and forcing him to give up his search of Hyunmin in the familiar areas of the city. But it didn't do much to only be able to explore the places he could see from the window he was currently sitting by. This wasn't like at home where he could go out anywhere in the world certain he'd find his way in the air that he'd breathed easily his whole life.

Corellia ached in ways that Lothal never had. But Haknyeon couldn’t be miserable and pessimistic about things forever.

"Yeah," Haknyeon aid with a small smile. "How did you know?"

"Sunwoo told me," Eric said. His ears glowed red but even if Eric felt abashed in any way he pressed on. "Hwall and I are jealous. We want to go somewhere like that one day."

"It's a really nice place," Haknyeon said. "My farm isn't near any of the capital cities but there are a few stormtrooper bases about so the town sees a lot of travellers from distant systems. You'd make lots of friends there."

Eric nodded. "Cool. So you've lived there your whole life, right?"

"Yeah."

"And you know what Lothal is famous for, right?"

"The calendar?" Haknyeon hazarded. Apparently this was not the answer Eric wanted to hear and his face fell. Haknyeon wasn't sure what the correct answer was. Even with invasion and the sort of governmental unrest which collapsed far greater planets, Lothal was proud of the calendar which had been used throughout the galaxy to measure the passage of time regardless of where the centre of the galaxy was meant to be.

Coruscant was unthinkable parsecs away from Lothal yet looked to them to maintain history. But that wasn't something Lothal was famous for in Eric's opinion.

"Sorry," Haknyeon said.

"No. Forget that," Eric said. "Jedi! Have you ever met a jedi?"

"Aren't those just stories?" Haknyeon asked. 

"Everything is a story at some point," Eric shrugged. "But I have heard all about things on Lothal. That's where the Jedi knights took their apprentices to get their kyber crystals for their lightsabers."

"Even if they were real and had powers and stuff they were all wiped out a very long time ago."

"So you're saying you haven't met a Jedi?" Eric clarified. "Hwall is going to be so disappointed when I tell him."

Haknyeon couldn't imagine a person to be any more disappointed than Eric was so he hoped Eric wouldn't tell Hwall and crush whatever dreams he had of Jedi knights freely roaming Lothal.

"Maybe you shouldn't visit there, just in case it doesn't live up to the expectations that you have," Haknyeon suggested.

"No way! We definitely have to go there and find where the surviving Jedi are hiding." Already Eric had cheered up but he was scrutinising Haknyeon in an instant. "You're not a Jedi, are you?"

"Of course not!" Haknyeon grumbled as he leaned away from Eric's focus which would have been better put to use on the floor where he had left a dull moat of unpolished floor around Haknyeon’s seat

"What's that around your neck then?"

Eric's curiosity was swift and he grabbed at the stone Haknyeon wore around his neck before there was even the chance to dodge. He smiled and released the stone and returned his hand to clutching at his broom.

It wasn't much of a habit to run his fingertips over the cool green stone but Haknyeon had found himself idly reaching for it as he watched out of the window for any indication of Hyunmin on the winds. And now, with the reminder of it, Haknyeon's fingers returned to it.

"It's a reminder of home, I suppose. Hyunmin and I both wear them. We found them a while ago. It was just after we got married so we wear them for that."

"Hmm," Eric said, tapping his chin. "So you just found these? On Lothal? And you don't think they're kyber crystals?"

"I'm not a Jedi," Haknyeon grumbled.

"What about this Hyunmin? Is he a Jedi?"

"He isn't!" Haknyeon asserted.

Eric had gone back to work quickly after that, polishing far too enthusiastically so that the droids who disinfected the floor skidded and were unable to do their jobs properly. Haknyeon had assumed that was the end of that particular debate yet Eric wasn't the only one insisting things that day.

“Haknyeon,” Hwall said upon arriving at the room with the food trolley. Hwall was ever cheerful and wheeled the trolley into the room with ease, even patting Haknyeon’s shoulder on the way in. Already Haknyeon found the situation suspicious because Hwall could be cheerful but this degree while pushing around one of the hotel food trolleys was not typical. Haknyeon hadn’t even known these people for very long yet he knew when to be suspicious of behaviour. But it wasn’t an excuse to be rude. 

“Good evening, Hwall, how are you?”

“Yeah, fine,” Hwall replied. “So you’re from Lothal, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Hwall looked through the trays of food and chose one to put on the table in the room. Haknyeon already knew what the question was before it came out of Hwall’s mouth. 

“You’ve seen Jedi before, right?”

“I’m sorry, Hwall,” Haknyeon said as he helped himself to a spoon from the trolley. “I have never met any Jedi on Lothal. Or anywhere else.”

Hwall’s mouth closed on his next question and he looked to be pouting.

“You’ve seen a lot of travellers, haven’t you?” Haknyeon asked. “Maybe you’ve met a Jedi and never even known.”

Hwall thought for a moment and grabbed Haknyeon’s wrist. “Then I could say the same for you! You’ve met one, Haknyeon!”

It wasn’t the point that Haknyeon was trying to make. He patted the back of Hwall’s hand and wondered how annoyed he was ever allowed to be seeing as Hwall was one of the people who had saved him from wandering lost alone on an unfamiliar planet. He had only ever received favours and kindness so entertaining the curiosity about meeting jedi was something he could put up with. 

“Maybe I have met one at some point without knowing but you must have met countless working in a place like this.”

Hwall looked cheered by such a possibility and quickly embraced Haknyeon. He was brimming with excitement as he pulled the trolley out of the room. It was nice enough to make the people who helped him smile like this and Haknyeon wondered whether it was this easy all the time. 

Here in the spaceport resort on Corellia everything appeared just that bit easier. He wasn't sure whether it was an effect of it not quite being a place that was true to the planet because it was filled with so many tourists and travellers and people whose orbits were just out of step will the parts of the world that he had managed to see while visiting Hyunmin’s parents. That wasn't to say that everything truly was easy and he'd give up the life he had always known to land himself somewhere that he didn't quite fit just because of that. 

Finding Hyunmin and returning to the home he had always loved wasn't easy. But making sure not to get caught while he stayed at the resort was exceptionally easy. If he spent time with Hwall or Eric as they cleaned the hotel the service droids were often not particularly bothered about whether Haknyeon was there or not. The days Sunwoo wasn't working were spent scouring the small part of the planet that Hyunmin could possibly be in. Even in a place invisible on the atlas flickering above Sunwoo’s comm unit there were infinite places Hyunmin could be. 

“The problem is that we're both looking for each other so we both keep moving,” Haknyeon pointed out on a lunch break. Unfortunately they were at a bar that the pilots frequented so it was difficult to focus on the map under the din. 

Sunwoo smiled at Haknyeon and dimmed the map until it flickered to nothing. He kept smiling even when Haknyeon was struggling his way through protesting. It seemed rude to demand Sunwoo keep helping him but he found this wasn’t even close to the sort of assistance he had been promised. 

“Maybe you should stop moving,” Sunwoo said as though that was enough to put an end to Haknyeon’s frowning. 

“What is that supposed to mean? How will that help me to find Hyunmin?”

Sunwoo nudged Haknyeon’s drink closer to him and waited until Haknyeon closed his hands around the cup before explaining his reasoning. “You said that Hyunmin is from here. Instead of getting more lost yourself you should stay in one place. What better place than the biggest resort on the planet. You can talk to as many people as possible to spread the word and eventually he will bump into someone who will let him know that you’re around.”

Haknyeon frowned harder and Sunwoo laughed. 

“Why are you thinking so hard? Is it not a good plan?”

“I don’t know,” Haknyeon said. It seemed like a strange idea to wait for Hyunmin to come to him. He wasn’t even sure how much Hyunmin would know about the resort. The buildings around the development all looked new and can’t have been more than a handful of years old. Hyunmin hadn’t really lived here on Corellia for a while. His family home was hours from here and even then Haknyeon guessed that Hyunmin had spent a great deal of time away from home as he trained to become a pilot. Maybe if he had spent a while working as a courier located in the same star system he might have frequented the resort and the casinos as leisure facilities as often as Sunwoo and his friends did. Instead Hyunmin had diverged from sensible living like that to join a way with his friends that can’t have gone the way they were expecting. This was all probably new to Hyunmin almost as it was to Haknyeon. They were both strangers to this place. 

“If it’s meant to be he’ll find you,” Sunwoo assured. It seemed so easy for him to say something like that. He wasn’t stuck here wondering what he was meant to do to get back to his own normality.


	6. Hyunmin Runs

Hyunmin had been here for days, stuck watching the rising and setting of the sun as Corellia turned and watching the bright sparkle of the twin brothers Tralus and Tallus distantly orbiting Corel in the inky sky, and Eunki still hadn't spoken to him. Hyunmin was beginning to think that Haknyeon was right all along, that Eunki hadn't been bothered enough to send the frequency through the galaxy, pointing it in the right direction just to call Hyunmin back home again. Not that Hyunmin would be able to tell Haknyeon that he was right any time soon.

Hyunmin didn't want to accuse his old friends - or his friends, they were still extant and smiling at him so warmly and happily and telling him they were so glad that he was alive - of lying to him but they had successfully waved away any of Hyunmin's requests to go out and find Haknyeon. He was starting to get sick of them. Chances to get free were few and far between and whenever Hyunmin thought he had his chance to get away there was Kiwon or Wontak or Daehyeon steering him somewhere else and reminding him how good of a pilot that he had always been. Hyunmin knew that he was a good pilot, to an extent, but there were a lot of good pilots out there. Corellia was full of the kind, yet none of them were being detained like this for a job Seongri needed help with in the Kaliska system.

The job in the Kaliska was something Hyunmin was less adept at avoiding the topic of. Seongri was desperate to see Hyunmin too. It wasn't fair that he had to wait all this time and had to miss out on seeing him again just because he was out doing something important for the group. Hyunmin was starting to hate Seongri for not being around. It was nothing to do with Hyunmin and far more to do with Eunki, not that Hyunmin could prove it whilst being so efficiently ignored.

Even when there weren't any people to impede Hyunmin's escape from the base to go out and bring Haknyeon back there were droids. At this point Hyunmin wasn't even sure that he could trust KT-G. Hyunmin was only with his astromech right now in the sitting room that Kiwon had set up in the time Hyunmin had been gone. Through the window Hyunmin could see the sun Corel dipping behind the mountain on the other side of the valley, dousing the needles of trees in the bowl of the valley in amber light. Already the fourth night was falling. Anything could have happened.

"KT," Hyunmin said in the twilight quiet of the room, unsure of whether things were the same anymore. The astromech trundled over and nudged against Hyunmin's shin in the way he always had. "Hey."

KT-GZ bleeped more quietly than it usually did.

"Are you playing well with the others? That's nice. Do you like it here?"

The droid didn't reply instantly. Hyunmin hoped it meant what he thought that it did. And then KT-GZ chattered brightly about how nice it was to meet everyone properly.

"Hyunmin."

There was no point in trying to pretend away his surprise. It was a voice that Hyunmin hadn't heard in far too long. Even in the half-light Hyunmin would recognise Eunki anywhere. He cut a tall figure in the archway and strode into the room elegantly. He wore his old nickname, and the taunts of people who didn't want him to join as a pilot of the rebellion, well.

"Hi," Hyunmin said. Eunki stopped in the centre of the room and smiled. After the days of silence this wasn't the warm welcome Hyunmin had hoped for.

"You didn't die," Eunki said. Definitely not a warm welcome.

"I didn't die."

"Kiwon tells me you have a friend that you want to find."

Hyunmin hadn't expected Eunki to get right to the point so quickly but he also hadn't expected any of this. He had expected smiles and the usual jokes before some assistance finding Haknyeon and some interest in meeting him. Having none of that, not even any interest in Hyunmin himself, it wasn't the time to let the technicalities fall by the wayside. A binary warning came from thigh-level but Hyunmin was the pilot not the assistant.

"Haknyeon isn't just a friend, he's my husband and anything could have happened while you've all kept me here."

Any venom Hyunmin injected into his words fizzled impotently in the face of Eunki's disinterest. "Did you not want to be here with us? Did you not miss us while you were playing happily with some stranger after leaving the rest of us to worry about you? Did you just carry on bleating about this friend when you were shown the place where we all go to to remember you and beg everything in the universe to bring you back to us alive?"

The composure crumbled but Hyunmin didn't have a clue what Eunki was talking about and this wasn't the time to be shy about admitting as much. There was nothing noble about the way Eunki grabbed Hyunmin's arm, nails biting through his sleeve, to drag him from the sitting room.

KT-GZ followed, whirring weakly but the droid only served to draw more attention as Eunki pulled him through to the main room and to another of the doors at the perimeter. Eunki slammed on the switch on the door and shoved Hyunmin into the dark room before the door hissed closed behind them and the room brightened slowly. Hyunmin could still hear KT-GZ calling from outside. But Hyunmin couldn’t reply when he saw an old helmet he hadn’t seen for a long long while. 

It was Eunki who had suggested Hyunmin learn to fly. It wasn’t a unique idea. The planet, the whole system, was full of pilots and Hyunmin was nothing special but the Corellian skies and the vacuum beyond even that felt like a place to belong. The scuffed old helmet in this tiny cupboard had felt like all Hyunmin needed to accompany the rush of being able to go anywhere. 

There was more than just the helmet. The walls were covered in sketches Hyunmin had done of all of his friends. His own hands had created the smiles captured in portraits and the smudges of sanguine that made its way onto Seongri’s face when they all ached with exhaustion from days of training and being scolded by the other pilots in the rebel alliance. Hyunmin hadn’t seen all these sketches for so long, there was unsteadiness in the lines but the approximation was enough that he could tell even now who everyone drenched in their own youth was supposed to be. Across the pictures and trailing across the walls were messages, wishes to see each other again and lightly scratched whispers of how much Hyunmin was missed. 

“What did you say, Hyunmin? Did you care at all about any of us while we were so desperate for you?” Eunki asked. 

Hyunmin’s fingers curled into a fist before he reached out to touch the helmet. It had been years since he pulled it over his head it and the logo of the old shipping company Hyunmin worked for had almost worn away. 

“I missed all of you,” Hyunmin said. The words didn’t come out easily no matter how true they were. 

“Did you?” Eunki asked. There was something bitter about his smile as he nodded at Hyunmin. “Did you search for us for years, flying to every part of the galaxy that you could? Did you hack into communication channels to send out messages to find out whether we were even alive at all?”

Hyunmin hadn't done any of that but he hadn’t the resources or capabilities to do so. He hadn’t stopped caring about them just because he was uncountable parsecs across the galaxy. But he wasn’t going to try to make up for all of that by blindly going along with whatever would make Eunki happy now. 

“No, I didn’t search for you. I knew exactly where you’d have all returned to anyway, Eunki. That didn’t mean that I didn’t care about you or that I didn’t worry about how things were for you all.”

“The difference is that we all love you. And you could go on without wondering whether we lived or died.”

It hadn’t been like that at all. Hyunmin wasn’t uncaring and living his life without even considering how things could have been for everyone who he had left behind. But he was in a place of hopelessness and didn’t have to worry about surviving each day on Lothal. Haknyeon had taken away the need to worry about any of that. Even if he still worried about the others he had faith that they could cope in ways that he couldn’t.

That faith proved itself correct in the base that seemed more like a home than it ever had when Hyunmin lived here, and the tiny nicks and scars of exhaustion which melted away to shallow nothingness when they were all together, and the messages on the walls all around Hyunmin with promises to carry on for each other and for him. 

“You all lived because you could,” Hyunmin said. Eunki scoffed but there always had been something different about him and the others. They wanted things and didn’t let them go for anything. And Hyunmin had been able to let go of all those things he had heard for so long because he found something, someone worth turning to. 

"I can't come back to this," Hyunmin said. "I can't fight this war anymore."

"What happened?" Eunki asked, stepping closer and bringing forward his distaste at the words he was hearing. "You used to want to be with the rest of us and do something. And now you want to be weak and stay out of it. Don't you want to change anything?"

There were whole worlds that were disrupted by all sorts of things that had been enacted by both the First Order and the New Republic. But there were so many people fighting these fights which must have had some other solution. Hyunmin couldn't be a person who sought it out. He was already so tired and he had lived too much for too long. He just wanted to go home and look after the farm with Haknyeon and miss his old life from afar without having to worry about whether being in a place like this had imbued him with the stench of death once more.

"I want to change lots of things," Hyunmin said. "I want to change the fact that I ever took Haknyeon away from his home just to lose him like this. I want to change the fact that killing people, regardless of the things we thought they represented, had become sport for us. I want to change the fact that I tried for so long to live with the things that we did even though I knew that it was wrong and that was why it always felt so bad. I can't even tell you all the things that I want to change, Eunki. I want to change the way that you're looking at me right now. Telling me that you missed me and you all loved me when maybe we'd have all been better off left alone."

Hyunmin was slow to dodge but Eunki stopped himself before his punch made any contact. Maybe there were more things that Hyunmin should have changed. But he himself had already changed and he'd noticed it even at home with his parents. They were glad to see him alive but there was a sour note to the reunion which Hyunmin noticed clouded too thickly in the air the longer he was around to breathe it. Corellia wasn't a good place for Hyunmin.

He chanced a glance up at Eunki, breaths laboured from his rage. Corellia must not have been good for him either.

"Hyunmin," Eunki said. "We need you. Seongri needs you to help him out. Are you going to leave him after everyone has been asking you to do this job for us?"

Hyunmin wasn't heartless but he was being honest when he said that he couldn't return to this life. There was no way he could turn his back on doing what was right for him and the new life that had formed so easily around him and repaired the endless blue that he looked up into ever since he had fallen out of the sky. This place really wasn't for him.

"I need to find Haknyeon. When I find Haknyeon I am going to take him home and we won't return to this place."

"So this meant nothing to-"

"Eunki," Hyunmin interrupted. They had said enough of the same things without coming close to a resolution. "It meant plenty to me at the time but things are different now. Even if I still care for you all I have a different life now and I am happier like this."

It was enough that Hyunmin didn't tell Eunki that he could be happier if he changed the way he was living too. He didn't need to say such things when everyone seemed to have made their peace with their own type of happiness which gave them a reason as they fought here. Hyunmin simply needed to leave this place and he needed to go back to the way things made sense for him. He needed to go back to idling away on the farm without worrying about the mortality of himself or others.

Eunki slapped the switch on the wall, the lights were doused and the door whooshed open. KT-GZ immediately started babbling at Hyunmin as though asking after his condition. Hardly any time had passed at all but it was enough for Hyunmin to make up his mind about how much of a mistake it was to want to retread old ground. He should have been more wary of being called back to the planet he had already escaped from once.

The others were cautiously quiet around the far table as they watched Hyunmin leave the small room. Hyunmin wondered how recently some of the messages had been scratched into the wall. And then all thoughts shattered with the crashing impact behind him.

"Eunki," Daehyeon said reproachfully. Not that it even did anything to deter Eunki from trying with all his might to smash the helmet.

Picking up one of the chairs to bring down over the helmet didn't do much but even as old as it was it was still designed to be able to protect from impacts even as Eunki's disdain fell upon it. Even Kiwon approaching to ask him stop did nothing. Eunki falling upon him and snatching away his blaster before backing away came as a shock to Kiwon.

"Hey," Kiwon said steadily. "There's really no need to- Eunki drop it now!"

Eunki didn't drop the blaster and continued to level the barrel at Hyunmin. It wasn’t the first time that Hyunmin had been on this end of a blaster but he had really hoped that the last time would be the last time. But Hyunmin had to live long enough to see something akin to anguish in Eunki’s face as he aimed at him while pushing away Kiwon’s interference.

“You really don’t want to bother with us anymore? After everything?”

Hyunmin said nothing. He could try to argue his point again and again but Eunki wouldn’t listen. There was no reason to keep trying so hard now. Hyunmin glanced at Wontak and Daehyeon and wondered whether it was worth seeing everyone again if it was just going to come down to this. To end on a sour note too. Hyunmin sighed and waited for Eunki to do his best. 

But Hyunmin had longer to breathe and Eunki pointed the blaster at the helmet on the ground. It only took two blasts before it shattered from the bolts of neon power but Eunki released a few more all the same. When the shrapnel had settled and Eunki’s rage had subsided he tossed down the blaster and stalked away with Kiwon on his heels. He stabbed impatiently at a switch on the wall but when he disappeared through the door the atmosphere didn't dissipate. 

“He’s just upset,” Daehyeon said shakily as he approached. A fragment of the helmet crunched underfoot and he winced while adjusting the weight. It was not as though Hyunmin would feel hurt by something like that. Things had changed too much in the last few moments Eunki had been upset before but it had never resulted in something like a blaster pointed at anyone. 

“I’m upset too,” Hyunmin said. KT-GZ trundled over and bleeped sadly. Hyunmin appreciated the sentiment but it was something he’d just have to get over. 

“I’m sorry, Hyunmin,” Sunghyuk said quietly. He reached out but dropped his arm a moment later. Disappointment wasn’t contagious but it wasn’t as though Sunghyuk could really offer much in the way of comfort at a time like this. 

“I think I’ll just go and lie down for a while,” Hyunmin said, returning the awkward smile from Wontak. He wasn’t expecting anyone to really try to side with him and defend him especially when he felt so distant from everyone, but he wished he didn’t have to stand out here with old friends and feel like such a spare part. 

“I will come and check on you in a few hours,” Wontak promised. 

Hyunmin went to the room he had been allowed, the room that didn’t even feel like it had been his at all, and listened to KT-GZ attempt to be reassuring about the situation. 

“I know, KT,” Hyunmin said as he patted the droid on the lid. “We’ve waited for too long. We need to find Haknyeon tonight.”

KT-GZ whirred enthusiastically. 

“Yeah,” Hyunmin muttered. “But it doesn’t feel like things are so bad, you know? I just think I would feel it if anything had happened to him. I can’t make him wait any longer than I already have. I have to find Haknyeon tonight.” 

It wasn’t a solid plan but Hyunmin was desperate to leave. Loving his friends and missing them was one thing but this wasn’t how he had ever pictured reuniting with them. He was sick of being trapped here and no matter how much they tried to remind him of old times the current times were far more urgent. 

Hyunmin wasn’t sure how long it would take before Wontak would come to check on him but there was still a lot of movement from the main room so passing through that way to leave was the stupidest of Hyunmin’s lacking options. But Hyunmin didn’t have to rely on being stupid. He had an astromech who was intuitive and wouldn’t let Hyunmin stay here when they both had something to do.

KT-GZ projected the layout of the base into the air between them. Hyunmin’s eyes ached as he stared at the shifting blue light but he was able to find where they were positioned on the map. 

“You’re smart, KT. Did you map this all out yourself? Don’t be so silly how could you have for this much data from a light fitting?”

The droid insisted that it siphoned the data from a light fitting and Hyunmin found himself loath to continue the disagreement. A droid could have secrets too, he supposed. They could argue over that later. For now Hyunmin was more worried about working out whether there were any routes on the map which would get him out of this place quickly. 

“I’m not as smart as you,” Hyunmin muttered to the droid. KT-GZ only bleeped louder but Hyunmin needed to concentrate. It was one thing to use the light-fittings to get data such as layouts but now there was the need to use the information to work out an escape route for a human and a droid. 

The lights flickered and KT-GZ whirred shrilly. Hyunmin looked up at the ceiling and then down at his astromech. 

“The lights?” KT-GZ confirmed the guess but Hyunmin still didn’t understand. “I already told you I’m stupid. You can’t even be considerate and learn Galactic Basic to tell me things like this. Yes, I know, you don’t have speech capabilities like that. Whatever.”

That wasn’t the end of the disagreement for the droid but Hyunmin had stopped listening. He stood and crossed the small room to switch off the lights. KT-GZ radiated azure in the depths of the darkness but even that illumination wasn’t too much to drown out the draughty openness around the light set into the ceiling. 

Hyunmin pointed up at the light. It was flat and round, the diameter probably as long as KT-GZ was tall. “Even if we go up there, which sounds too large of an oversight to actually be possible, that’s not on the map.”

The droid responded rudely and Hyunmin wondered why he bothered. 

“Say whatever you want to me now, KT. As soon as we find Haknyeon I am going to tell him all the awful things you’ve said to me and he’ll turn you into a trough or something.”

KT-GZ outdid itself with creative insults and Hyunmin almost wished that he could fully explain the binary code in Galactic Basic. He’d be able to hash out a translation into Durese or even Olys Corellisi if given long enough but that wasn’t really anything he could share with Haknyeon.

Hyunmin just got on with the task at hand. KT-GZ seemed to have eradicated the attitude from its system (temporarily) and remained still and quiet while Hyunmin dragged the bed towards the centre of the room. The task wasn’t an easy one but Hyunmin wasn’t bothered about making a racket at this point. He was probably going to be left alone for a long while so everyone could do their best to appease Eunki, someone who had remained by their side for the three years Hyunmin had been on Lothal and even longer before then. There were no hard feelings, at least, Hyunmin had it in himself not to feel too sensitive about the state of things seeing as he was currently attempting to escape from his friends. 

KT-GZ decided to start being a nuisance again as Hyunmin stood on the bed but Hyunmin ignored the droid and focused on trying to force the light fitted into the ceiling back through the hole. 

It felt like progress as the ceiling crumbled and rivulets of scree dribbled over his face so even when KT-GZ was laughing it wasn’t something Hyunmin was going to give up on. The heels of his palms ached from bashing at the light fitting, his shoulders were sore from constantly pushing upwards, and his eyes stung from all the dust that had sprinkled over them but he had to keep going to get out of here. He wasn’t sure whether he or the light in the ceiling would be the first to give way because it was obdurately unmoving even with Hyunmin’s minor successes. 

Hyunmin needed to keep trying. He needed to do whatever he could to get out of here. So he kept going even when his hands and his elbows were numb and his breaths singed in his chest. He’s supposed to be adventurous and he’s supposed to be brave and a person doesn’t inherit traits like that without persistence. 

But then KT-GZ said something and Hyunmin was irate in his exhaustion. “What do you mean? How can I move this the other way?”

The astromech was insistent about something for a while until Hyunmin tried thinking what the opposite of what he was doing would actually mean. He squinted up through the dark at the light fitted into the ceiling. Pulling it down seemed even less likely and he could do much more damage to himself and the room if he ended up tugging at all of the connections. 

“What if I die?” Hyunmin asked. KT-GZ didn’t sound too bothered and Hyunmin supposed at this point it was a risk he would have to take. At least he would be taking the chance to find Haknyeon.

Slowly he felt around the rim of the light but there wasn’t much he could grip onto the try to move it the other way. But he had to try. He managed to hold onto the round light and pulled as hard as he could  KT-GZ was hopefully cheering Hyunmin on with the racket he was making until he finally yanked the light clean out of the ceiling. 

The weight of the lamp knocked Hyunmin off his feet. He would have much preferred the astromech to be helpful and not laugh at him but he didn't dwell on it too much considering the progress he had made. He was better equipped to lift KT-GZ with the knowledge of how heavy the droid was. The astromech still complained while Hyunmin lifted it up and pushed it through the hole in the ceiling. KT-GZ trundled around patiently while Hyunmin struggled to pull himself up into the plenum space.

Wherever Hyunmin looked there were glowing circles embedded into what he now supposed was the ground. It was a more solid floor than what he would expect for plenum space. Even when he had been living here years ago he had no clue that there was an annex like this above his head. It made sense that it could be used as service access but there was something oddly convenient about it.

Hyunmin had to crawl on his hands and knees but KT-GZ could roll around leisurely. This annex can't have been here by accident. It must have existed by design but Hyunmin couldn't imagine the purpose that it had. Nor did he understand how he was supposed to navigate himself. It was a room as wide as the entire base but there wasn't anything to mark the locations below. He crawled to the nearest circle of greenish-blue light, knees scraping over grit and crunching over hollow exoskeletons. The light up here stung compared to the soothing calm of the dark and there wasn't a way to see what room was below each of the lights.

"What now?" Hyunmin whispered. The droid didn't bother answering at an audible level and instead trundled ahead slowly. Hyunmin just about managed to keep pace and followed along. He had to trust that his companion after all these years wouldn't let him down now.

The heels of his hands already ached from how long he had spent bashing at the light fitted into the ceiling of his room. Now he was cautious about placing his hands down as he crawled but outside of the glow that orbited each of the lights set into the ground here he found himself driving fragments and splinters of solid mass into his palms. Even worse was when KT-GZ took a turn and changed directions. There were no walls or obstacles that impeded progress up here but after a few turns Hyunmin realised that the droid must have been following a route mapped out below with walls and doors and even people and droids who needed to be avoided.

And then they reached the wall. KT-GZ stopped and rotated slowly. The dimly flashing lights on its anterior face blinked expectantly.

"Are you talking right now?" Hyunmin asked. The droid responded in kind but Hyunmin was at a loss. He could respond well enough to the audible binary because there were patterns that became something he could remember and understand when he realised the situations he heard them. He couldn't see any meaning in the droid's communication like this. "I'm sorry, KT, I can't understand you. Are there people?"

KT-GZ flashed something but it was incomprehensible.

"First, show me what an affirmative answer is," Hyunmin requests. He needs to be able to communicate with the droid otherwise he will be uselessly alone here. The astromech's lights blinked three times in quick succession. "Now a negative answer." The light dimmed for a second before brightening once more.

This might work. Hyunmin was going to struggle sticking to closed questions when he has so far said whatever and been able to understand the droid's opinion based on whether it sounds irritated or happy or confused by his stream of consciousness. But the situation wasn't impossible.

"Are there people," Hyunmin whispered. KT-GZ's lights flashed three times.

People could have meant anything. It was better to avoid everyone at this point. He didn't want to take any risks like having to argue his point with his friends. He was leaving regardless.

Hyunmin pressed his ear against the wall. KT-GZ seemed to say something but it wasn't one of the answers Hyunmin had asked for so he decided to ignore it. He tried to listen closely but there was no sound from that way. He waited and waited until eventually KT-GZ blinked slowly. He didn't quite know what to do from here.

"Where are we going?" He asked. KT-GZ stood patiently. And because less patient. It rolled backwards and then forwards into the wall with a thump which rung out dully.

"This isn't a wall," Hyunmin said. An affirmative answer. Hyunmin felt around the wall carefully. His hands could barely register anything aside from the throbbing ache that was coming from within them at this point but he found a seam on the surface of the wall. Slowly Hyunmin followed the lines until he traced out a square perimeter. It began halfway up the wall and didn't quite finish flush with the ceiling.

"Boxes?" Hyunmin asked. KT-GZ's response was uncertain. Hyunmin tried again. "If I push this would it be a bad idea?" Affirmative. "If I don't push through this way will we be stuck here?" Affirmative.

A bad idea was better than no idea. Probably.

Hyunmin knelt up as high as he could without having to bend his neck too much. He pushed at a point in the centre of the square. Progress was gradual but he could feel it moving and he could hear the low squeaks of this box scraping against the ones around it. The box eventually tumbled right out of place and crashed onto the ground loudly.

"That really was a bad idea," Hyunmin noted. KT-GZ agreed. On the other side of the wall of boxes there was an alcove which was lit differently to the rest of the annex. Rather than a gradual glow of green-blue the light was oddly grey. There was a breeze which carried something of a ferrous edge despite it smelling pleasantly familiar. It smelled distantly like home. It smelled like Hyunmin's chance to find the life he had been separated from.

They had to move more quickly just in case someone came to find them. Hyunmin lifted KT-GZ and pushed it through the gap. It silently protested at being wedged through the gap sideways like this but the complaints could wait until they were free. But Hyunmin wasn't completely awful so he apologised when KT-GZ crashed to the ground on the other side. Hyunmin trusted that the droid's systems wouldn't be too rattled from the impact. It wasn't a very big fall anyway.

Hyunmin crawled through after the droid and was very careful about not stepping on it. Here, the route to follow was clear.

After righting KT-GZ Hyunmin crawled over to the grate in the floor. Just by looking through the grille he could see the drop wasn't much different to getting up here from his room. The only difference was the stacked containers which would make moving with his droid more difficult. He didn't have to try hard with the grate to make it swing open on its hinge. The noise echoed around the hangar below and Hyunmin was cautious of doing anything too drastic at this point. He couldn't hear any movement below but that didn't mean nobody was down there. It was whilst listening out for movement below that he realised what KT-GZ was being so persistent about. 

The box that Hyunmin had pushed out of his way was no longer sealed. The lid had jostled away from the rest of the box and in this lighter area of plenum space it was worth investigating further. 

The entire Corellian system was a haven for those in the galaxy with something to hide. Across the five brother planets the reputation was the same. Regardless of species someone who was raised here was slippery, untrustworthy, and tenacious when it came to things better left alone. Hyunmin had grown used to being treated with derision despite how loudly his piloting skills spoke for themselves. It was a point of comradery for Hyunmin and the people he befriended, the family that hard formed and he had found he couldn’t live without (up until he needed to get away from the life he had) but there were always people on the outside who didn’t see past their preconceptions. And perhaps there were things that Hyunmin hadn’t been able to see past either. 

The box was full of blasters. Hyunmin fully removed the lid and saw that the blasters were familiar in a way he hoped they wouldn’t be. E-11s were the standard blaster of choice of stormtroopers and there was a box of them (maybe more, he hadn’t looked in any of the other boxes imposingly stacked around him and he wasn’t going to because he didn’t want to discover the extent of the problem) in the place he had called home. It could have been retribution and they could all have been stolen, or they could have been a legitimate trade item. Hyunmin took a blaster. It was already loaded with a power cell so he decided it was good enough to keep. He attached it to his belt and got ready to move. 

Hyunmin had waited for long enough. He lowered himself through the opening and he landed as lightly as he could on the containers stacked directly below. KT-GZ bleeped nervously from above. 

“Trust me,” Hyunmin said. “I can catch you. Just roll over the edge.”

KT-GZ hesitated but eventually rolled over the edge. The impact Hyunmin expected never came. The droid eased itself down using the small jets on its base. And landed carefully in Hyunmin’s arms while somehow not scorching him. And then it dropped its entre weight on him and he was knocked onto the container. Hyunmin had been worried about making too much noise but all such thought flew out of his head as he yelled out in pain. 

He pushed the droid off his chest, groaning quietly in pain, and tried to work out how to breathe with his entire skeleton in shards. KT-GZ didn’t care at all and cheerily trundled on its way and used its jets to glide off the edge of each container and down onto the next one until it reached the ground. 

It wasn’t an accident that the containers were stacked like steps though he was thankful of the intentions behind the design so that he could climb down each one without doing himself any more damage. 

Things were going well. Hyunmin had a blaster and his companion droid and now he was going to get himself a vehicle. 

“Which one should we go for, KT?” Hyunmin asked. 

He didn’t get to hear the answer.

 


	7. Haknyeon Meets a Jedi

Sunwoo had left Haknyeon a message that had travelled via several other pilots and the resort staff who seemed to know all about Haknyeon's situation. He waited patiently at the meeting point but he didn’t know how long he was supposed to wait here. 

He was impressed that the shuttle pass he had been given earlier even worked at all. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust any of his new friends but he was worried that their kindness wasn’t foolproof. They were doing so much for him by letting him stay in rooms and move around without being found by any of the higher-ups. Haknyeon hadn’t been able to sleep well since he’d arrived, terrified at the prospect of being discovered and all his new friends getting into trouble because of him. 

Haknyeon was as careful as he could be so he didn’t like to risk doing anything that could get anyone else caught. He didn’t even want to to consider what the consequences would be for him but he’d hate for people who had only ever been kind to suffer because of him. So he was careful and he did what he was told. But today he wished he had some sense of autonomy. 

Outside of the city Haknyeon could see the countryside sprawling into the distance, the landscape looking more like home as it fell away further than he could see. Within the city the resort had brought the untouched nature into the limits by building a monorail to an island that sat in a very large lake. The area of park was surrounded by woodland which stretched all the way to the pebbled shores of the island. It was quite a nice place to wait but it would be much better to wait here when he wasn’t so worried about how long he was waiting. 

Sunwoo was supposed to have met him by now, Haknyeon was certain of it. He had been here for hours and the sky was smouldering amber but despite the heat in the sky the planet was getting cooler. Night was falling and Sunwoo wasn’t here yet. 

“I wouldn’t go out after nightfall,” Jacob had advised Haknyeon when they were folding bed sheets one evening. Haknyeon supposed that helping out was the least he could do to repay the kindness of being allowed to stay here. 

Jacob was kind. He had all sorts of stories for Haknyeon about the pilots he had seen come and go and all the wealthy travellers who had given him gifts. Jacob and Haknyeon had different definitions of gifts. Haknyeon understood them to be material trinkets and souvenirs that Jacob might never have seen as he remained in the ‘tween space of the resort which was Corellia and also wasn’t. Jacob called all the stories he heard gifts. Haknyeon had to remember what the difference was when Jacob offered him a gift. 

But he wasn’t even being told a whimsical story secondhand from someone who claimed to know unknown space and had lived with the Chiss and knew of their secrets. Jacob’s gaze was kind but serious.

“Why shouldn’t I go out at night?” Haknyeon asked. 

Jacob added another folded sheet to the pile on the shelf and said, “There are things that nobody truly understands no matter how long the history of the planet is studied. We don’t know everything about this system and why it was created in the first place. All five of the planets are strange by design. The orbits and ecosystems are all confusing enough for the natives. As ancient as the worlds are that just means there is more that we should beware of when we’re in an unfamiliar place.”

“So you mean I specifically shouldn’t go out at night?”

Jacob shrugged and said, “I suppose I am saying that. You could get lost or disappear or anything awful. You can’t disappear before we manage to help you.”

It was a strange thing to say but at least Jacob was smiling. Haknyeon had smiled back and promised not to disappear. 

Sitting in the park made him wonder whether Sunwoo had disappeared. He wasn’t from Corellia either despite his extensive knowledge of the planet and the crafts which had been engineered here. The fire in the sky was blowing into ferrous embers but the steel in the sky didn’t bring Sunwoo with it. He wasn’t sure how long he was supposed to wait here but there was a chill in the air that had time stretched endlessly while he sat with his arms wrapped around his middle. 

The climate on Corellia was changeable and Haknyeon still wasn’t used to what he had seen through the windows of a tower that pierced the sky, or when he had felt the heat of the city bearing down upon him so he wasn’t surprised when the needles of chill on his face turned out to be rain. And he was still alone. 

Sunwoo wouldn’t forget Haknyeon, there was no way that he would. He was always certain to talk to Haknyeon and seek him out when he was back from a flight to help him out with searching for Hyunmin and a way home. But he’d left Haknyeon here for hours getting colder.

And under the thick curtain of the rain Haknyeon hoped that Sunwoo had forgotten and hadn’t been stopped on his way to meet Haknyeon by the creature that was grumbling behind the bench Haknyeon waited on.

The current chill wasn’t solely from the thickening rain drenching Haknyeon and everything around him. The grumble rolled right out of the ground itself slowly until it spilled over as a growl which blasted coolly over the back of Haknyeon’s neck.

Haknyeon’s eyes stung with the relentless torrent of water pouring into his eyes from the sky but he had to see to make sure. Canine creatures existed all across the galaxy and there could have been any species behind him but there was something too familiar about the sound behind him on this occasion. It was a sound Haknyeon barely recalled but had learnt to fear from the bedtime stories and nursery rhymes back home. But it was impossible to hear something like that on the core worlds. 

The force was something that Haknyeon wasn’t sure about. It was allegedly embedded throughout the fabric of the galaxy but that didn’t mean things should manifest at will because of possibilities like that. Creatures native to Lothal, creatures who existed for no reason other than to keep the inhabitants and invaders in check with fear, shouldn’t be here. 

Haknyeon shielded his eyes the best he could but the trickles of rain were pouring non-stop through his fingers. But he knew what he was seeing bare breaths away from his face. He was frozen stiff yet he knew he wouldn’t have been able to move without the rivulets of rain freezing right through him.

Teeth. 

The gleaming row of teeth were comically bright against the iron shards of fur that covered the Loth-wolf’s body. Each curved blade straining from the creature's mandible was larger, more sparkling and more capable of eviscerating Haknyeon than the one next to it. The Loth-wolf parted its maw and huffed out a breath hot enough to make steam of the raindrops falling around its snout. The breath carried a stench more acrid than the barren industrial air in the city and the source didn’t bear thinking about. Haknyeon could hardly believe he was staring into the kyber green eyes of his own death like this. 

“Are you real?” Haknyeon asked in a breath that he wasn’t even sure made its way out of his chest. But he stopped worrying so much about that when the entire planet spoke in response. 

“Are you?”

The rumbled question made even the droplets of rain tremor as they hung in the air. If there was anything that would make Haknyeon believe in the force it was the presence of a Loth-wolf right in front of him. A creature manifested from the very thing which connected the entire galaxy, even appearing on a planet where it shouldn’t exist so far from a planet that might even been sentient in its wielding of the force, speaking to him like this so far from home was proof of something he had never wanted to be near in his life. 

The Loth-wolf dipped its head, nostrils quivering and hackles raised more to mock Haknyeon than to show alertness at his presence. Haknyeon’s mum had a blaster back on the farm to frighten off the wolves but Haknyeon had nothing like that now. He only had the shuttle pass but that was flimsy card and no deterrent to a wolf far closer and larger than Haknyeon could have imagined. Haknyeon wished he had something when the wolf’s nose grazed against his chest, bumped at the crystal pendant hanging around his neck. 

“You are far from home, human.”

“I am,” Haknyeon agreed, unsure if his tiny voice reached the voice quaking the whole planet. 

“Should you not return?”

Haknyeon didn’t understand that. He was halfway across the galaxy from home and he had no way of getting back. He had no intention of going back without Hyunmin, that was the whole reason he was still here freezing in the rain. He shook his head, uncertain of what any of this meant, until the wolf gnashed his teeth at Haknyeon. He flinched back but the loth-wolf growled and gnashed its teeth more roughly, sour saliva whipping Haknyeon’s face even through the downpour. 

The rain pelted the ground and the trees and the bench Haknyeon sat on but even with the sound of saturation he could hear the revving chorus of growls. There were more. Haknyeon couldn’t see them through the thickness of the atmosphere but he knew they were there. More wolves gathered in the endless grey all around.  

The next word simmered, a breath in the smoke of the early evening, enough to jolt Haknyeon from the bench where he sat. His chest burned, the weight pressing against his sternum halfway between cracking his bones and shoving him away from the sulphuric smile from the wolf ahead of him. 

“Go.”

Haknyeon took the instruction even though he knew he could never outrun one beast let alone a pack of them. Ever stride he took over the slick ground was unsteady and his feet slipped and skidded even with the divots in the ground which threatened to trip him. 

This is what he had expected when he saw the Loth-wolf, the hacking barks from the wolves as they gave chase reminiscent of the distant sounds that had kept him awake in his childhood bed. Except he couldn’t be paralyzed with fear here, the gentle hand of his mother sweeping over his forehead with the reminder that they were safe in their home, and every one of his footfalls was another opportunity for him to trip.

Haknyeon knew that the wolves were playing with him. He wasn’t prey that they would so easily devour because if they wanted him that way so soon he would have been killed by now. They were chasing him for sport. No matter how Haknyeon’s chest burned and how his limbs felt numb the Loth-wolves were a step behind him because they wanted to be. 

There wasn’t even a way for Haknyeon to escape on this island anyway. He didn’t have a single place to hide let alone get back to the resort or to find his new friends. Or an old friend. He just had to keep running until the last strand of hope in his chest frayed enough that he would give up on getting back home again. There were plenty of steps he was willing to take until the hope ran out. 

The wolves were content to let Haknyeon take as many more steps as he needed but they didn’t intend to make it any easier for him. Being chased into the woods wasn’t the relief Haknyeon had hoped it would be. He tried not to think negatively about the pounding of paws and the flitting of slate in his periphery and he veered into the woods on his left. But the sparse flora wasn’t enough to shade Haknyeon from the rain which still poured and made the ground under his feet into sludge. 

The rain softened everything until it was all indistinct in the pursuit. Haknyeon couldn’t distinguish between his own strides and the wolves’ and his unravelling breaths were the same as the gleeful yapping from the pack. Only Haknyeon was separated from his own and his family might never know how or why he never returned to them. It was a shame and Haknyeon wished those thoughts had never occurred to him as he took stumbling steps through the artifice of this Corellian woodland.

Haknyeon’s legs gave in far quicker than expected. He tumbled down a gorge with clods of dirt sticking fast to his skin and clothes as the wolves skidded down behind him, surely victorious. 

The warmth that smeared away the dirt on Haknyeon’s cheek didn’t feel particularly canine. It felt far more human than it should as it pressed drily against his face. His chest was weighed down too heavily but it didn’t quite feel like the eager press of a wolf’s forepaws making his ribs crack. There was something certainly above him, blocking the rain from rinsing him as it had before. He rubbed at his eyes with sodden sleeves and wondered how dangerous it was that he couldn’t bring himself to sit up and be alert. But once he had removed most of the muck from his eyes he could open them to see a cloaked figure above him. 

The evening was even deeper in the midst of the trees but there was a refraction of light around the figure, a halo caused by the deflection of raindrops. It surely seemed like a divine image when he recognised the face beneath the hood. Haknyeon once had a friend who disappeared without a trace. Whenever he mentioned her to his friends growing up they all regarded him with the same confusion, a frown as they tried to recall anything similar to what Haknyeon had described, before they gave up on wracking their brains and admitted they hadn’t a clue what Haknyeon was talking about. It had been years since Haknyeon supposed that the friend who had been a frequent playmate during infancy was simply a figment of his imagination. If she had never really existed Haknyeon had secretly decided to remember that he had thought she had existed at all. He never quite believed his mind would create something as real as a person and a friendship, so Mina (who had disappeared before Haknyeon could stop counting his age on his fingers) was real to him up until this moment. 

The Mina peering down at him was untouched by the rain and had patience in her face that had perhaps been learnt as she aged but real people who existed to more people than oneself didn’t appear to a person on the brink of their death. Though there wasn’t a single wolf around so Haknyeon might not have been on the brink of his death anyway. 

Haknyeon wasn’t sure where to draw the lines between his reality and what was imagined but he wasn’t sure that he ever had. 

“Mina,” he said feeling far too close to tears for his own good, “I want to go home.”

She didn’t react visibly, not a twitch on her face as she stood slowly and she gazed into the middle-distance. Haknyeon had no idea what she could be seeing through the smog of the trees but he couldn’t bring himself to climb to his feet and look in the same direction as her. He wouldn’t have been able to see past the heat in his eyes anyway. He wiped at his face quickly, dirt falling away from his cheeks and washing with the rain that spattered on his skin without Mina standing above him. 

“This isn’t home,” Mina said. A whisper of wind on the dead air of the wood. She reached a hand down to him without looking and even if his nose burned with the pressure of unshed tears in his head he took her hand and stood beside her.

“Where did you go, Mina?” Haknyeon asked, “Why are you here?”

She turned to look at him with cold eyes. “Why are you here? Did we ever exist in a place together?”

“I don’t know. I just want to go home, Mina. Maybe you weren’t ever there at all but I need to go home.”

She stared uncomprehending, not a single drop of rain landing on her while Haknyeon was still soaked as the rain plummeted through the leaves on the trees. But she squeezed his hand and Haknyeon was only further confused by that. It was an action that didn’t match the blankness of her face and he wondered whether that was as pretend as her existence in Haknyeon’s memories. 

“I will take you to some friends,” Mina said.

Haknyeon didn’t know what she meant by friends but he was no longer being chased by wolves and there was light that he could hold onto in his hands. And this was good enough for him to follow without protest. 

They didn’t talk at all and Haknyeon supposed that they had never been friends at all, this Mina was nothing more than an apparition despite how soft her hand felt in his own. The rain saturated everything, dropping heavily over the woods and softening the ground that they stepped on, each step muted under the whoosh of the rain yet Haknyeon wasn’t getting any wetter. He shivered all the same. The rain falling around him and not touching his skin wasn’t the help he wanted when he was already so chilled and he wasn’t getting any warmer or drier. 

Haknyeon hadn’t a clue how big the island was but he was sure that the chase and the walk with Mina must have taken him the whole way across to the furthest shore. But they were still walking through the trees. 

“Mina,” Haknyeon said, unsure if his voice would make a difference to her pace or whether she even noticed Haknyeon at all. She didn’t react, continued walking ahead through the rain-soaked island. He supposed talking and not talking would amount to the same thing. It was better to try. “Are your friends really here?”

“Not yet,” Mina said from under her hood. She didn’t say anything for a few paces and Haknyeon wondered whether that was the end of it until she added, “we will find them soon.”

“Who are your friends?”

“Witches,” Mina decided. 

“What does that mean? What do these witches do? Why are we going to them?”

Mina paused her stride for a moment. She turned to peer at him from under her hood and despite her fingers closed around his hand the meeting of their eyes was enough for the buffer of air between him and the rain to break. His vision clouded with the dim refractions of the twilight woodland and he was doused once more in the icy rain. With Haknyeon being drenched Mina continued walking, leading the way through the dark and not pausing for each time Haknyeon’s ankle rolled in the sludge of the ground. 

Talking was even less use now as Mina had no intention of listening to Haknyeon so he gave up asking questions while the wind swept his words from his mouth and into the dead of the air. Haknyeon was ready to drop when Mina finally stopped. He hoped their path would find some diversion because staring over the edge of this cliff wasn’t the most heartening thing when Haknyeon was already shivering hard enough that his teeth chattered louder than the rain that drenched everything around. 

“Mina?”

She didn’t seem to even hear at all as she stared out. Haknyeon doubted she could even see anything more than he could, the needle tips of trees in the valley below shivering in the icy rain, but she scanned the drop below for a long while. Haknyeon felt numb all over even as he shivered but Mina didn’t pay him any mind until he reached out for her other hand. Her startled gaze had Haknyeon wondering why he reached for her in the first place. 

“Did we really know each other?” Mina asked. “Did… I think I remember you but I think I don’t.”

“Are you alright, Mina?”

“No,” Mina said. “How do we get home?”

Haknyeon stopped shivering but the glacial cold was still settling its way through him even after Mina had changed. He was worried to ask the question but he needed to find the answer. “What do you mean? You brought me here because you said your friends could help.”

Mina frowned. “I have to help you, Haknyeon?”

“You don’t have to help me,” Haknyeon said, “but you said that you would before.” 

“I can’t,” Mina frowned. Even through the rain stinging Haknyeon’s eyes he could see the quiver of Mina’s lower lip and the furrow of her brow as she looked up at him, a moment of even her protection from the rain faltering and leaving her drenched. “Please, help me, Haknyeon. I don’t remember where home is.”

Haknyeon did his best to wrap his arms around her despite the fact that they were both sopping wet and chilled from the rain. He couldn’t let Mina stand there without trying to remind her that even if the past was uncertain her home had once been on the edge of the galaxy in the place that time first started. 

“We should stick together, Mina,” Haknyeon said through the chattering of his teeth. “I bet your family still live in town. You can come back to my farm and we’ll help you.”

“We?” Mina asked. 

“My mum and my sister and Hyunmin,” Haknyeon said. It was good enough to remember that there were that many people waiting for him. There must have been just as many waiting for Mina. He pulled away to tell her as much when he noticed something odd about her expression. 

“I’ll help you,” Mina said. 

“You will?” Haknyeon wasn’t sure whether his conversation with Mina was even linear at this point. There wasn’t much that he understood. “You just said that you-”

“I will help you,” Mina said.

Mina placed her hands on Haknyeon’s chest and then she pushed him. As he slipped backwards he realised that he should have seen that coming even from the moment that they stopped at the cliff so it was his own fault that he ended up plummeting through branches of the trees below the summit. 


	8. Hyunmin the Pilot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i took like a 2 month break from posting and the sad thing is that i already had like this chapter and 8 others done i just couldn't be bothered to proofread this one before posting. anyway it turns out i am going to be too busy and tired to properly write and achieve any goals so i just have to do my best to get this all over and done with. i have like 6 chapters to finish writing before i can wash my hands of this project but i just know it will take far longer than it should do.

Hyunmin didn’t have to wait to long to have KT-GZ back. The woman who had taken his astromech was the same one to lead it back to the room. She was all smiles and endearing dimples when she opened the door. 

“Hyunmin,” she sing-songed as she showed him the tray in her arms. Hyunmin still wasn’t used to being greeted like this by Yehana even when he had hours of solitude to consider why his de facto captor was so cheerful even when his own responses had ranged from sullen to aggressive. Her patience had proved to be endless and even now she was kindly encouraging Hyunmin’s droid into the room and tittering just as shrill as the astromech’s own binary beeping about how confusing the labyrinth of passages could be to the uninitiated. Once the door hissed closed behind her Yehana tilted her head and peered down at Hyunmin. He smiled awkwardly up at her from the bed he was tethered to by his ankles. She didn’t seem to mind the silence. “Did you sleep well, honey?”

“I… Yes, thank you,” Hyunmin said. He’d spent countless hours testing the give in his restraints so he knew it was pointless to try now. He was overtly familiar with his reach and what it looked like to have his freedom smiling sadly at him whilst asking why he was being so troublesome. Guilt ached dully in Hyunmin’s stomach from the dreams which warped every single instance of acting against his best interests into the reasons why he was sitting here unable to find his way back to Haknyeon. Or even back to friends who had found him after thinking he was dead. Thoughts like that hadn’t exactly been conducive to good sleep but he wasn’t about to dampen Yehana’s kindness with that sort of truth. 

“Good, I’m glad.” She placed the tray on the floor and crouched beside it. “You’re not going to try to escape again?”

She was putting things nicely. The first time Hyunmin had woken up here he’d thrown that day’s tray of food right back at her and tried to run. He shook his head, oddly disappointed in himself for his behaviour considering the fact she was still holding him captive here.

“Did you get what you wanted?” Hyunmin asked as KT-GZ slowly trundled towards him. 

Yehana shrugged. “Do you think I know what the others want with you and your droid? I just about convinced them to feed you.”

She must have done even more than before to convince them today. She smiled as Hyunmin slid to the floor and lifted up a spoon. In the few days before now he’d been fed a thin broth and a lump of something glutinous. Today’s food was harder and drier and equally bland, but Hyunmin felt fuller more quickly and wasn’t sure why there was so much food left over when he’d eaten past the point of comfort. 

As with every day Yehana chatted about her friends and the supposedly funny things they had said without giving any sort of context. Hyunmin rarely paid attention to her chatter because he barely knew what it meant aside from understanding the language. He didn't feel bad when Yehana noticed he had stopped eating and her words stuttered to a stop.

“You’re done?” Yehana asked. There wasn’t any way Hyunmin could eat more without bringing it back up again so he gestured the affirmative and Yehana smiled. “Make sure that you’re ready. The others want to see you.”

“The others?”

“Your droid, KT-GZ is it called? It was helpful. Now they want to talk to you.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know what they want.”

“I don’t. They want to talk to you but I don’t know what about,” Yehana shrugged. She left with the tray and Hyunmin finally got to talk with KT-GZ for a while. 

“I missed you,” Hyunmin said. The droid’s response wasn’t particularly heartening but the distance must have made the droid loath to reveal any true feelings about their bond. Hyunmin didn’t mind seeing as he was afraid of being separated again too. “What did they want?”

The astromech wasn’t particularly forthcoming and Hyunmin guessed he was within reach of enough amenities whilst tethered to the bed that he could leave his companion to sulk alone. 

Hyunmin was surprised to learn that KT-GZ was very determined to keep sulking even when he was sent for again. 

“You’re shorter than I thought you would be.”

“How tall did you think I was?” Hyunmin asked. KT-GZ bumped against the wall loudly. “Never mind that. Who are you?”

“Xiyeon. I am here to take you to see Roa.”

“Why her?” The name was familiar from Yehana’s stories but she didn’t sound at all like the type to want to sit around and chat with strangers. Yehana made Roa sound like she carried the weight of an entire planet on her shoulders and never laughed like she used to. If she couldn’t even smile and laugh the way she used to with her friends Hyunmin didn’t want to have to face her and wonder just how much worse his presence could turn her mood.

Xiyeon gave Hyunmin a once-over and shrugged. KT-GZ said something with shrill beeps which didn’t mean much at all to Hyunmin, though he guessed the droid was being rude from the cadence of the binary, and Xiyeon kicked her foot out at it as it whizzed past her. “Yehana never told you? Roa is… She’s in charge, I guess.”

“In charge of what?” Hyunmin asked. Yehana really hadn’t specified anything and he hadn’t a single clue as to why he was being held in this room wherever it was. He didn’t even know how long he had already been in this place and there was so much that could have happened during his hours of uncertainty that he couldn’t have done anything about. While he was alone Hyunmin had tried to listen through the walls and he had searched for any flaws in the flat walls and any defects in the cuffs that detained him here. The room was more than secure enough and Hyunmin had to admit that wherever he was they had thought of everything to ensure he remained. 

Ignorance hadn’t settled well over Hyunmin. He watched the hesitation in Xiyeon’s face and waited for some fleeting acknowledgement that he was being detained unfairly. Instead Xiyeon had her own question.

“You’re not going to try anything funny when I loose you free, are you?”

Hyunmin had considered an escape attempt but he had recovered from the confusion of the days before and had realised how foolish he had been to lash out at Yehana - not only because she was so full of smiles and was gentle humanity for sporadic moments when he was stuck staring at walls, but also because he didn’t know a thing about the place nor how he could escape. He wouldn’t get far at all so he promised Xiyeon that he would behave. 

Xiyeon released the cuff at Hyunmin’s ankle with the swipe of a small box that fit snugly against the palm of her hand and then led the way without checking too closely that he was following. It seemed like Hyunmin would get lost without a guide and Xiyeon, whether personally or sharing the sentiment of others at this place, didn’t care whether Hyunmin ended up somewhere without knowing. 

The narrow corridors comprised of tight turns so even without the option of directions Hyunmin felt dizzy from the journey. Without asking he could already tell the architecture was intentional and he doubted Xiyeon and Yehana’s associates had chanced upon a structure like this. It was difficult by design and even having been spoken to at length by Yehana and in fragments by Xiyeon, Hyunmin realised that these people were more familiar than he had realised. He wasn’t certain of even being in the Corellian system but he was certain that these people were from planets thereabouts if concealing information came so naturally. 

“You’re smugglers,” Hyunmin said while checking KT-GZ was still following after being led through such awkward corridors. Xiyeon stopped and almost smiled at Hyunmin. 

“Yeah,” Xiyeon nodded. “Well done.”

“What do you do?”

“Don’t you already know far too much about us?”

“No? I actually don’t know anything about you.”

Xiyeon really did smile but the expression was nowhere near as kind on her face as it was on Yehana’s. Olys Corellisi was the language of those Hyunmin trusted the most but hearing it here pulled the hair upright on his skin. “Let’s hurry, Hyunmin. Roa wants to talk with you.”

Following Xiyeon to meet Roa felt more like a trip to Hyunmin’s own execution. He didn’t know what he was supposed to talk about with anyone, let alone with someone who was probably the ringleader for these smugglers. KT-GZ was unfortunately nonchalant about things and Hyunmin wondered how the droid that had accompanied him for years could express no reaction at all to the distress he was pretending away. 

The door Xiyeon stopped at was nondescript, the wall around it blank and nothing indicating there was anything different about what lay behind this door. Even without anything physical to denote its significance Hyunmin knew well enough that the dread that rose in his chest was exactly the right feeling. 

Xiyeon opened the door with another swipe of the small box in the palm of her hand and it seemed too easy. One key wouldn’t open so many locks so easily. Hyunmin didn’t understand it but this wasn’t even the time to consider it. Xiyeon’s sly smile remained when she swatted Hyunmin’s arm and jolted him out of the consideration. 

“Don’t keep her waiting.”

Hyunmin suspected that Roa had been waiting a while for a lot of things and any time spent waiting for him now wouldn’t make a difference. But there was nothing else for Hyunmin. He took a deep breath even though it wasn’t enough to steady his nerves and stepped into the room. The door closed behind him, barely missing Hyunmin’s heel, and he was separated from his astromech once more. 

“KT,” Hyunmin called through the door as he battered his fists against the unmoving metal. “KT, I need you, get in here.”

“Enough.”

The voice was neither loud nor strong but Hyunmin ceased his shouting and dropped his hands. He didn’t want to be alone here. He needed some familiarity here but he was back where he didn’t want to be. He was back wondering whether he’d be anywhere close to home in his life. But it was clear that there was nothing else for him here and he turned when prompted and walked further into the room. 

The room was dim and long with spotlights illuminating Roa where she lounged at the far end on a seat which was more like a throne than was sensible. This place was more similar to the place he had just left than he had expected. Maybe he was imagining the scent of rocket fuel lingering in the air which didn’t quite fit with the flowing swathes of gathered fabric which tumbled to the ground from her seat. Maybe this place really did stink of pilots. 

Hyunmin walked until Roa raised a hand. It was too easy to follow these orders but Hyunmin couldn’t bring himself to disobey something that had him wondering whether this was what he was meant for. 

“Byun Hyunmin,” Roa said as easily as an exhale. The accent was too similar to his own and to that of the friends he maybe shouldn’t have left in the first place. There was no need to speak Olys Corellisi here when there was nobody else around and even if there was the preference for the mother tongue the modern language would suffice. Hyunmin wanted to go home.

Roa dropped her gaze to a screen resting on her lap. She raised her gaze to Hyunmin once more. “You’ve lived an interesting life. How brave of you to fight with the rebel allies against the empire. And now you’ve undone all that by intercepting trade routes for supplies and stealing shipments to deliver them right to empire generals.”

That wasn’t anything like Hyunmin’s current life. “What are you talking about?”

“There is no point in pretending here. We can be friends. I’m just as nice as Yehana is.”

Hyunmin didn’t know enough about either of them to know how true this claim was but even hearing something like that set him on edge. “I didn’t. I didn’t do any of that. What are you talking about?”

“You’re Rainz, aren’t you? You’re very close to that royal and your droid has all the information on how you’ve been getting around our procedures to steal from us.”

“Are you rebel allies too?” Hyunmin asked. Even if the words felt heavy on his tongue and he had spent too long speaking Galactic Basic he didn’t think it was worth Roa’s unimpressed snort. 

“How silly. Why would we want to get involved with rubbish like that?”

“What does that mean?”

“Empires and Dynasties die every day,” Roa said. “Money outlasts everything. We’ve ensured that we survive but you and your lot have tried your best to force us out.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been in the Corellian system for years. I was on Lothal. You can even trace KT-GZ’s systems. We were there for years. I have a new family there now.”

“Hmm, we’ve seen where you alleged to be while all this was going on.”

“Alleged? I was there for years,” Hyunmin pointed out. He didn’t at all like how this conversation was going, especially not when he didn’t understand any of it.

“Don’t interrupt me. However I am curious about what you mean by that. A new family?”

“I fell in love with someone on that planet.”

“Was that someone a settler from this system?” Roa asked. She was leaning forward in her seat and this was something that didn’t fill her with ennui. “I haven’t heard any of ours have gone there but it wouldn’t be impossible if a small group have recently started to set up a home there.”

Hyunmin shook his head. The way of thinking was natural on Corellia, to put the loyalties of blood and origin before all else. It had been the very foundation of civilisation here but he hadn’t heard any of the more insular sentiments like this in a long while. Standing here before Roa it almost felt that everything that had led Hyunmin to this point was intentional. He couldn’t be sure that something in this universe wanted to part him from Haknyeon and remind him of where he came from. 

“I married someone of Lothal blood.”

Roa smiled. “Are you one of them now? Have you forgotten loyalty?”

“I haven’t forgotten loyalty. I just know where it is supposed to be now.”

Roa’s smile widened and she settled back in her chair. “How do you feel about lending some of that loyalty to me?”

Hyunmin wasn’t sure how Roa could ask him a question like this but he should have expected as much from a smuggling ring. He had nothing so he saw no reason not to agree. Even without a reason to abstain Hyunmin found himself in attendance at a meeting with some of the pilots under Roa’s command days later. 

The map of the star system flickered where it was projected above the round holotable. Hyunmin recognised the position of the five sibling planets of the Corellian system but he couldn’t work out no matter how he stared why the extraterrestrial factories weren’t where they were supposed to be. He looked around the table but none of the other pilots seemed bothered at all by the strange positioning.The pilots listened to the radio transmission from Nubia where another member of this group was explaining details of a task Hyunmin was meant to be involved with. 

“The point is to fly fast and avoid both imperial and rebel forces,” Kyla explained as the hologram zoomed in on a factory at the furthest reaches of Corellia. “They will be expecting us to use radionics while flying so we will only speak to distract them there. Our genuine communication will be with laser. You have to anticipate where your team is to ensure direct lines.”

“She’s talking to you, Sungyeon,” Rena jibed, “You can’t try to leave us behind this time.”

Hyunmin waited for Sungyeon’s usual sullen retort. Instead she only scowled at Rena. It had only been a few days but Hyunmin was getting used to the patterns in this group. Rena seemed cheerful enough but she was also a bit different to the others. Hyunmin hadn’t spent much time with her but she mostly stuck to Galactic Basic and she hadn’t ever said anything of actual meaning in modern Corellian let alone the old language. Were she anybody else Sungyeon would surely have retaliated with a comment about Rena’s language skills being a weakness to them but she stayed quiet and the concerns Hyunmin had were taciturn in the rest of them. 

Kyla didn’t hear or simply ignored Rena’s jibe and continued her explanation. “You’ll have to decide how to split your teams and how much genuine stock will be on each ship. What you must be certain of is making it here to Nubia with enough that the empire suppliers are sure we can honour the contracts whilst undercutting any of the other rings.”

“Do you think that we will run into anyone?” Sungyeon asked. 

“Absolutely,” Kyla said. Her voice crackled brightly and she was too enthusiastic at the prospect of them running into trouble. “Before now we had been expecting to run into trouble with other groups of smugglers who mostly deal with contraband to supply citizens with but now we have to be on the lookout for groups who want to get in our way and steal our operations for their own.”

Several sectors on the map glowed with highlight and Kyla added, “You will be flying through areas in this star system and others that several groups claim as their own. There is nothing wrong with that. They fly through our districts all the time. You just have to be careful of being followed, We can’t know that the ultimate trade wouldn’t happen in areas they claim to control.”

“Why won’t we know?” Hyunmin asked. He was hardly following any of what was going on and he didn’t like how he was supposed to act like he knew what the context for any of this was. Things were different when struggling to remember whether it was his turn to feed the livestock and he was trying not to fall asleep when Haknyeon’s sister was explaining the cash flow of the farm. The galaxy had been living on without him for so long that he didn’t recognise it. His friends had lived on for so long without him that he struggled to recognise them too.  

Kyla cleared her throat primly. “We don’t know because there are always conflicts. There are always groups trying to take more than what they have earned and they think lawlessness is an interesting and noble trait to have.”

“What does that mean?” Hyunmin asked despite Yehana’s agitated shushing. 

“It means your friends specifically think themselves above honour and decency and think we’ll fall to them because they flash their rebel alliance identification around like it will truly give them everything without trying.” 

“Is what you’re doing decent and honourable?”

“No,” Sungyeon cut back from across the table. “But we have all worked hard to retain the position that those who came before us created. There are many in this part of the galaxy who are comforted by our presence and protection.”

“But you’re supplying the empire. Aren’t you doing something bad?” Hyunmin asked. 

The table rattled from the impact of a fist and the hologram of the star system flickered and shivered. Roa stood from her seat and glared right through Hyunmin. Even with Rena attempting to placate her Roa held fast. 

“Do you hear that? Even traitors cannot completely abandon those who raised them. Shaking an unstable government to give what falls from it to the people it has wronged is equal to pettiness for personal gain.”

Hyunmin was more confused than before but when he tried to say something else Yehana shushed him quickly. Roa didn’t miss that and raised her eyebrow at Yehana who withered slowly. 

“We won’t let you down, Kyla,” Roa said as she straightened her spine. She cast her gaze around the holotable and didn’t allow her eyes to linger on Hyunmin for too long. “The traitor won’t be on my ship. I don’t need anyone undermining the operation and endangering everything we’ve defended for so long.”

“I know, Roa,” Kyla said. “Just be careful where you’re docking and who you’re talking to.”

Roa left the room with the airy train of her dress whipping up behind her as she went. 

“Is what I said that wrong?” Hyunmin asked. Sungyeon and Xiyeon averted their eyes and it was up to Yehana to try to explain things with a sort of friendly face. 

“Ignore Roa. She’s just sensitive because of how things have had to change. It isn’t cheap running an operation like this and unlike everyone else the empire has a lot of credits to throw around.” Yehana flinched away from what looked like a pinch administered by Rena but she still found it within herself to add, “It is likely that she doesn’t actually want to kill you.”

“Who said anything about killing me?” Hyunmin asked. The galaxy had changed too much while he was cloistered way in the furthest corner. 

  
  


“I still don’t understand what we’re doing,” Hyunmin said as he pushed yet another trolley loaded with cargo for the ship. 

Yehana knocked her knuckles lightly against Hyunmin’s temple. “We’re making sure everything is set properly. Xiyeon isn’t helping us because she just doesn’t want to.”

That didn’t sound like a good reason at all and Hyunmin didn’t see how it was fair that he would be stuck lugging things around when he didn’t even know what was inside all the containers. Though he supposed he didn’t have any choice in the matter. He had no sense of freedom. He was more of a prisoner than he wanted to admit to himself. Yehana sending him frequent smiles was enough to cloud that reality. 

Choice wasn’t a luxury that Hyunmin had unlike Xiyeon but the same could also be said about knowledge.

“Yehana, if I don’t know what we are doing I won’t be able to help. What if I make a mistake a ruin everything?” 

Yehana stopped walking and her grip on the trolley handles loosened. Hyunmin paused with her just to see where she was going with this. “If you make a mistake and ruin everything we’ll both die. Xiyeon too seeing as she is in our team. And we’ll lose both the genuine and counterfeit stock and we will renege on existing contracts while losing any chance of future contracts.”

“Will that matter if we are dead?” Hyunmin hazarded. Yehana’s lower lip jutted out and she huffed. 

“I mean ‘we’ as in this group. Our company. Pristin. If we fold there are a lot of people who rely on us who will lose even more than that. Jobs, homes, farms… you know, that sort of thing.”

“You’re trying to appeal to me now, aren’t you?”

Yehana grinned. “How did you know? Roa thinks you’re soft so we should make you feel how important this all is. There are people who live like you all over the systems that we protect.”

“Just like me?”

“Maybe not. But you’ve made yourself comfortable on a farm. You must know how difficult it is for these people. Adding an extra outgoing or taking away some of their income is just going to make their lives harder. We’re trying to protect them from things like that. Of course we have backups in place and he have hidden stores of ships in several systems that competitors wouldn’t know about but even so we’d rather not have to cause anyone to suffer in the interim of engaging those backups.”

It sounded too easy like this and Hyunmin almost thought it sounded right. He didn’t know any of the specifics but he knew how difficult things would be on the pig farm back on Lothal if a drastic change like that occurred. 

Knowledge was likely not a luxury at all. He should have continued on the path he had been set. Going on missions for the rebel alliance and pretending he didn’t care how close he came to dying each time. It was easier not to have to think about more complex things. Being told what to do was easy. Hyunmin had been told to load the ship and that was what he was going to do. 

Hyunmin was halfway up the ramp to the starship when Yehana called out to him. 

“You’re not upset are you? Nothing bad will happen if you stick to the plan and make sure you’re careful.” Hyunmin followed the route around and Yehana caught up to him quickly. “Hyunmin, did I make you sad?”

“No, Yehana, you didn’t make me sad.”

“You seem sad.” 

Hyunmin was sad but it wasn’t something that Yehana had exacerbated - not really. Things had been wrong for a while and even without being kept here against his will Hyunmin had failed his own expectations of being able to help the person he loved.

Yehana was nice and even if Hyunmin didn’t always understand what she was talking about he liked the rhythm of her cheer and how she found every little thing exciting. This wasn’t something that he wanted to voice and watch her dampen herself out of pity. Hyunmin shrugged it off and continued pushing the trolley of goods through the ship. Yehana was reproachful in his periphery so he was glad of seeing Xiyeon lying on one of the crates already stacked in the cargo hold. 

“Why are you sleeping here?” Yehana asked, her tone accusing without any bite to it.

“I’m counting the stock that you two are supposed to be bringing up more quickly than this,” Xiyeon said, somehow managing sound like she had the high ground. 

“They’re really heavy,” Yehana protested. 

“That’s because there is a lot of stuff in there.”

“How would you know when you’re only sleeping on top of them?”

Xiyeon elected not to respond to that and told Yehana to wheel her trolley to the other side of the cargo hold to start a new pile. Just like that Hyunmin was on the fringes of the bickering and listening to the rhythm of shallow taunts and squabbling that was comfortable after years of doing the same thing. It was familiar in a strange way because Hyunmin hadn’t been here long enough to really know how things would go but it stung at the dull ache of disappointment in himself. 

The odd prickling happened in his chest. Disappointment packed densely against his ribs but the painful tickle followed the hang of the stone he wore on a twine around his neck. It was something like another memory that he couldn’t quite remember so even as he followed Yehana with his trolley to fill up the cargo hold he held onto that feeling and wondered whether that was different to being sad after all. 


	9. space witches

Bona might have been the first. Or the penultimate. Time was impossible to ascertain on planets so far from the centre of this galaxy. When sentience only exists in one being with an entire planet orbiting wider and wider in the cold nothingness to make the silence echo there is no use in measuring time. 

Bona woke up not knowing the difference between millenia and milliseconds but she felt that ‘soon’ would mean something to her. In her dreams she had seen world that didn’t make sense. Humanoids surrounded by infinite species babbling and bleating in ways she would never comprehend if every instance of her life existed in those dreams. 

With each breath Bona closed her eyes and beckoned the devices and zooming flashes of machinery with her sighs. 

Bona was alone when her eyes were open and she saw the temple crumbling around her. Time, whatever that was and for however long it had idly spun the world, grew tired of the stone spires so it had them shake in the dead breeze. It was exhausted of viewing the enormous stone effigies of extinguished beauties and gods to all but Bona. Statues and structures wore away and mounds of dust gathered in the channels that the tide of airless winds had worn away. Each of Bona’s breaths grew heavier as she watched the world around her dying under a sun which had been growing cold for thousands of lifetimes. 

Closing her eyes, Bona met with friends who ran with wolves and propelled starships through the endless nothingness to reach friends who had seen everything with their own eyes and friends who had seen everything in piles of tomes. Bona even met friends like her when she closed her eyes - friends who were alone though they had each other - these friends starved and responded to the calls of nothingness in the baron stacks of stone that stretched on beyond all understanding. 

But even while being able to see friends who could bend the universe to their wills, directing the flow of life itself with insignificant motions and wishes, what Bona liked to see the most was the friend she could never properly visit. This friend had been locked away and ejected into the stars, hurtling away from an origin that Bona longed to ask about.

One day, or perhaps even the very same day that Bona had awoken for the first time, the sun flared with heat it hadn’t produced in a billion lifetimes. The whole world softened in the broiling closeness and everything shimmered indistinctly, moved with Bona’s breaths and quivered silently when she was too afraid to live as she always had. As the world melted the sun lit shadows of trails across Bona’s face. The sun told her she would meet all of these friends and bring the friend who shot through nothingness with her. 

 

Bona’s eyes were open and Haknyeon had to wonder whether this was what she had been dreaming of all along when she had been alone and closed her eyes to the world that was around her. The stones positioned around the fire were smooth and had glinted from a distance before Haknyeon had come with the witches to sit here. There was an order that Haknyeon had identified when the witches moved to their positions easily aside from one. Yeonjung had stood back beside Haknyeon and offered him a kind smile. 

“When were you born?”

Haknyeon hesitated. The Lothal calendar was the only one he had known but the pilots and workers at the resort had shown him how much easier it was for them to use other calendars. Haknyeon didn’t know what these witches used. In his silence Yeonjung smiled reassuringly at him. She raised her hand and combed through Haknyeon’s hair carefully. 

“You should sit beside Luda.”

Yeonjung gestured to the circle at a small witch who only looked even smaller beside the statuesque witch seated beside her. Luda had a small smile on her face which had set Haknyeon at ease and she had kept smiling at him as Yeonjung had spoken about Bona. 

Haknyeon had received many smiles since he had been here. The witches had been kind enough to drag him through the sodden forest to their living quarters, a large starship embedded deep into the ground for long enough that a covering of moss had rendered it indistinct from the forest around it. They had fed him and clothed him and agreed to help him when he had explained his problem. 

Dayoung had been hesitant to submit her guarantee and eyed Haknyeon warily as though she maybe did remember him after all his insistence, but she probably didn’t. Listening to the stories, Haknyeon was most curious about Dayoung’s. She was only two spaces away from Haknyeon but even from this proximity she was identical to someone he thought he had met on Lothal years before but there was nothing in her treatment that suggested mutual recognition. 

Dayoung had been watching Haknyeon through the story. She jolted with surprise when a small steaming bowl was passed along to her but followed the same as everyone else by waving her hand above the bowl and passing it on to Eunseo. 

Haknyeon didn’t have a clue why a small wooden bowl was being passed around the circle but his fingertips had skittered over the markings carved into the warm wood when Luda passed the bowl to him. She quietly reassured him when he almost spilled the dark liquid from the bowl. He glanced down at the liquid, mirror-still and wondered whether the reflection in the bowl really was him. He didn’t stir his fingertips through the liquid like the witches had and he passed it to Dawon on his other side. She squeezed Haknyeon’s hand and thanked him for passing it along. 

The bowl went to Dayoung and she swirled the tips of her fingers through the viscous darkness in the bowl and she passed it along to Eunseo and then Chengxiao and Bona. The magic must have strengthened with each pass until it reached Exy. She might even have been the leader, not that she had introduced herself as such but there was a certain way that she held herself and how the other witches adjusted their orbits at the slightest gesture from her, and she held onto the bowl for a while longer. And then she handed the bowl back to Yeonjung and completed the cycle. 

Yeonjung didn’t follow the same action as the other witches. She simply held onto the bowl and spoke once more. 

 

Bona wanted to trust the sun. It had illuminated the dying world for as long as she had lived and it had sustained the dreams that were created in her mind. Each of Bona’s dreams grew saturated and weighed more heavily than the lifetime she had spent closing her eyes before. With her mind growing tired with each of these dreams there was more that Bona wanted. She wanted to blend the dreams in her mind with the dreams her body resided in. 

 

“Did she-” Haknyeon stopped and thought of the question he really wanted to ask since Yeonjung had stopped speaking. The story wasn’t complete but she had been silent for too long for this to be part of the flow. Haknyeon hazarded a glance at Bona who was still watching the fire. “How did she do it? How did she mix the dreams?”

“Do you think she did it?” It was Yeoreum who asked the question. Her canines flashed with youthful cunning and Haknyeon wasn’t sure he wanted the answer if it was being asked like this. 

Bona’s gaze was holding steady and maybe she wasn’t seeing Haknyeon at all. 

“Why do you have to make it sound so ominous?” Soobin asked. She had a nice laugh that would have been comforting if all of the circumstances around them weren’t so ominous now. 

“How do you want me to make it sound?” Yeoreum shot back over the flickering flames. “Don’t you want to hear something interesting?”

“Then we shan’t listen to anything about you and your pets,” Soobin chuckled. 

“That’s enough, girls. You’ll ruin the spell,” Exy said. She was smiling so it seemed that Soobin and her gentle humour had the support of the leader of the group. Yeoreum pouted even with Xuanyi at her side holding her hand. 

Exy tapped her fingertips on Yeonjung’s shoulder and that looked to be the cue for whatever magic this story held. Yeonjung tossed the pitch contents of the bowl into the fire. Sparks flared and Haknyeon flinched away from the spray of heat. The fire roared as it stretched high into the sky but the witches held fast against the blast pushing out at them. The thirteen of them stared steadily at the searing amber light, uniform in beauty that had Haknyeon sitting right at the edge of the stone he shared with Luda. They were all beautiful from the start but seeing the flickering of light dancing over light on their faces made the sparkling of their skin dance across their features, drawing Haknyeon’s gaze to all thirteen of them and reminding him how out of place he was here. 

The tower of heat singed Haknyeon’s eyelashes yet he couldn’t take his eyes away from it, trying with all his might to squint through the wavering air to see the witches furthest from him. They were sublime as they were rapt and there was something more than beauty in the concentration that broke when the flames dropped to a whisper in the pit. 

Haknyeon blinked the sparks out of his eyes and saw Eunseo shimmering as she smiled across the smoulders. 

“Maybe you’ll like this story,” she said as she glanced aside at Haknyeon.

“Was that story finished?” Haknyeon asked. He looked over at Yeonjung but her expression was neutral, cooling with the flames. 

“Don’t worry,” Eunseo said gently. “She likes this story too, don’t you, Yeonjung?”

“Yes,” Yeonjung nodded emphatically an equinox away. She held her hand out to the flames, her arm not quite reaching the wavering licks even as her fingertips beckoned at the flames. And then the wisps of light jumped from the embers and crawled along the joints of her hand to simmer all the way up her arm. She offered her glowing arm to Seola who was sitting stiffly beside her. Seola took her hand and with her other hand reached out for Yeoreum. 

One by one half the ring of witches joined hands. Haknyeon flinched at the soft cool of hands either side of him before he realised Dawon and Luda were trying to hold his hands too.

“Me too?”

“A circle comprises of infinite points,” Dawon said as she held her hand out with a steadily expectant stare. 

“Let’s hold hands,” Luda said. “We’re the same.”

Haknyeon still didn’t quite understand but Luda grabbed his hand without any further discussion and Dawon softened the impossibility of her beauty with a smile until he reached out to press their palms together. The crescent was complete and the gleaming from Yeonjung’s arm waned along the links with an itch that crawled beneath Haknyeon’s skin. The light stretched along the clasped hands all the way until Eunseo. 

Haknyeon’s eyes stung as the intensity of the glare brightened. But he was glad that he didn’t close his eyes, not that he was any less confused at the bowl on Yeonjung’s lap flinging itself into the fire. Half the circle, from Dawon to Soobin, sat still as the fire spewed fragments of the bowl, confetti soft, over them. The fallen stars, miniscule in size but titanic in strength, settled on the ground and the fire in the middle of the circle quelled in the wake of infinite wishes glowing gently all around. 

 

Just as the force exists in all living beings in the galaxy there are beings which exist only because of the force. It manifests in many ways. Knowledge. Strength. Fear. Anger. Hate. Suffering. However the laws of right and wrong are the creation of a certain sect of the galaxy. The true defenders of the galaxy, the purest wielders of the force, know only survival of themselves and their peers.

A wailing infant knows nothing of this, never had, but the force took pity. 

As wolves the force raised the child. They taught it to crawl and to walk and to run. They taught it the way of truth and they taught it the way of deception. The wolves taught the child to act like the many species which inhabited the planet they lived on. 

The child fought and stole and ran with the wolves. And then the wolves had nothing else to teach the child but the force. 

The child was a dedicated student, taking well to the ways of the impossible wolves, and soon became a defender of balance. The nature of the galaxy staved off the encroach of imperial government into the planet where the child lived with the wolves. They existed to protect stasis, taking back from intruders what belonged to the balance and the child lived by the same rules. 

There was one intruder that didn’t take anything from the wolves of loth, an intruder who visited the vulnerable minds of the pack and startled them from sleep. With their ears flat against their skulls and their hackles raised, they searched for physical proof of the slight against them, yet all the proof they had was the child who pointed to the stars. 

The vast skies above faded into indigo night but the child told them to sit calmly. The child showed them the amber storm of a perennial day where their intruder mourned the conversation they never had. 

And just as the wolves searched for reason, the atmosphere shattered and the sky above exploded in the wake of the capsule that shot across the entirety of everything. 

 

Eunseo stopped talking and left just the rumbling growl of the embers in the fire pit. Haknyeon blinked his eyes rapidly but the harsh glow in the dark danced more wildy with the shuttering of his eyelids. He couldn’t be sure whether there really was a chorus of wolves licking gold in the charred kindling. 

What Haknyeon could be sure of a trio of points around the circle, brighter even than the whispering of the fire itself. The narrow triangle began right beside Haknyeon at Luda, and then at Xuanyi beside her. The furthest point wasn’t quite halfway across the circle at Meiqi, but it was all that remained of the light outside of the fire and they glowered ever brighter so the shower of light that fell previously was almost nothing. 

Haknyeon closed his eyes. The next voice came from beside him. 

 

Nearby there was a girl. She lived a rural life and only played with children of neighbouring farms. The stories she read weren’t in the books that she never learnt to read but the words of warning from her parents and relatives and friendly adults from the village where she lived.

She grew up seeing the very real signs of the wolves she had been warned about. Livestock stolen from her family's farm, the broken fences that needed mending, the blood shed over the ground in trails that had the animals trembling in fear. 

And then there was something she had never before heard stories of. A blast of energy hurtling towards the planets atmosphere that made all the sky explode. 

The girl cried and cried as the world rumbled with the same fear of everything unknown. The world was in unity yet there was nothing worse for the girl. The blanket as thick and white as the snow of Hoth fell on all the lands to suppress dissent and disagreement but even when the storm troopers came it was not enough. And the black scisms and fractures appeared to birth the death troopers. They quietened everything until the screaming and protesting stopped. 

The winds of the land whispered in fear of what they followed and in fear of what would follow it. But the girl never heard more than the frantic whipping of ignition before she was disappeared from the verdant planet. 

This same girl, but also a girl who was very different realised how the matter of the universe communicated with her using the gentlest flows of energy. The shock waves from her childhood reached her in ripples that never quite hushed themselves before the next one arrived. 

It was power, it was simplicity, it was everything she had never known she had needed until she possessed it. Meeting other friends who greeted the galaxy in ways similar to hers made her crave more knowledge. 

It was by pushing the boundaries of their capabilities, each one exploring the infinities of existence, that they discovered the witches who stood on the edge of everything as they divined the union of thirteen with the Woostri waters pushing them onwards. 

The collectors of the galaxy met them all. Their starship was modest but it was comfortable enough for the both of them. They had nothing but a windfall of credits and their need to meet the people they knew so well in their dreams. 

The thousands of star systems wouldn't be aligned so perfectly again for several millions of years, yet the two collectors piloted their starship rapidly between the burning suns to ask the girls they had known for as long as the universe existed to go with them. 

The unknown was terrifying but as they came together, trading starships for larger and larger vessels to accommodate their growing number, the sight and acuity became more focused. There was nothing they didn't hope to understand. They eventually knew themselves all to be witches who studied the reason for all existence with schooling they happened across when the force pulled them so far beyond its reach. 

 

Haknyeon couldn't hope to understand everything from each of the witches’ stories but there was much that he had been able to piece together from the knowledge of talking to them since he arrived here. They had shown him some of the smaller acts that would impress a person but the illusions (or else startlingly real feats) paled in comparison to the towers of fire and blistering lights the witches had created while speaking of their origins. 

He supposed Yeoreum must have blown here on the back of an airless wind seeing as she possessed a kinship with the lothwolves unique to the place Haknyeon had always lived. He had almost forgotten the day the sky exploded but it was nothing more to him than a more interesting eclipse. His life hadn't changed as far as he was aware but in some way it must have. He hadn't been moved across the galaxy to land before someone who had dreamt eternally of the arrival, and he hadn't been stolen away by soldiers who were only repeating the deed that had been done unto them before they lost the option to dissent. 

The day the sky exploded Haknyeon had cried and run home covered in mud and snot and tears so the next obvious step was for Haknyeon's family to assure him and each other with warm words and warmer gestures that were eventually enough to forget everything which came before. But that was the day that happened a thousand times more for some of these witches and in a way their ritual of adding more friends wasn't so different to Haknyeon's. 

It was something akin to understanding that had Haknyeon assuming that the next witch to speak would be Bona. Instead it was Meiqi only a few seats away. 

 

The entire galaxy gasped at the tear that obliterated a path through hyperspace into real space. Once it was silent the priestess in the temple found the girl who had flown towards her since time ended and began anew. 

 

The light in the vicinity snuffed out and there was nothing. Haknyeon’s breath caught in the back of his throat. But then he forced an exhale as hands on either side of him reached to steady him. The air was still breathable. Light was blown across the circle in a long puff of glittering condensation. 

The spectrum of hazy air began at Meiqi and spread until it settled dreamily as an aurora on the ground. 

Whether it was an illusion or very real manipulation of reality Haknyeon was impressed. He had assumed the force to be whatever it was heeded to be to suit the code of the extinct knights. Rather than that it seemed there were more ways to connect to the eternal pulse of the galaxy and show the beauty and complexities that were generally hidden from the populace. Though being able to achieve feats like this were beyond Haknyeon’s level of comprehension. 

There was possibility and potential and he felt that from every one of the witches. 

Exy on the other side of the circle nodded to him and that was enough for him to absorb whatever from the realm around him that flowed gently with the swells of space itself breathing for him. 

“The thing is,” Exy said as though nonverbally she hadn't already confirmed the infinities of hope in the universe. “We are here to find those who fall from the sky so they can be returned to their rightful place. In all my time I have found people rarely fall out of their old world by accident.”

 


	10. haknyeon and the force

The witches were no less mysterious even with Haknyeon knowing what they were. They came from all around the galaxy because of the force and Soobin even smiled at Haknyeon and said, “The force brought you to us because we are meant to help you.”

Haknyeon wasn’t certain of that. He remembered having a companion who brought him closer to the witches but his memories wisped away from his fingers as he tried to close them around the translucent tendrils of his thoughts. 

“You were alone when we found you,” Dawon said. She swept Haknyeon’s hair away from his forehead and lifted up her other hand before his face. Resting on her palm was a jewel. She said she would use it to scry but Haknyeon wasn’t sure what that meant. He glanced down at the jewel but something brought his gaze back to meet Dawon’s eyes. He wasn’t to look away.

“You said that Yeoreum found me, right?”

“Correct,” Dawon agreed. “Her wolves detected your presence and she brought you to us.” 

Haknyeon nodded his head and the jewel in Dawon’s hand glowed a faint red, almost pink but more concentrated in its saturation.

“Don’t look at it. Look at me.”

Haknyeon returned his gaze to Dawon’s and she drew her hand down his face, gently along the column of his neck, and then to the solid flat of his sternum. 

“This is how,” Dawon said. Haknyeon didn’t understand until she moved her hand away and a distantly familiar weight pressed densely against his chest. It was the stone he shared with Hyunmin. Haknyeon withdrew the stone from beneath his shirt and dangled it between himself and Dawon on the old length of twine. The glow from the stone was far brighter than the jewel in Dawon’s hand, only it was green rather than red.

“Kyber,” Dawon said. 

“Kyber?” Haknyeon asked. Dawon smiled and quickly sealed her hand around Haknyeon’s stone. 

“In times of old the Jedi knights took their younglings to the caves of Lothal to mine crystals for their lightsabers. They’re not easy to come across. How did you get this?”

Haknyeon had heard of the Jedi taking Kyber from Lothal for their lightsabers, in fact Eric had recently pointed this out to Haknyeon back at the hotel when fishing for a confirmation that such fairy tails existed, but it sounded both more and less ridiculous coming from Dawon. 

Dawon possessed the sort of grace that is innate of nobility, nothing of the sort Haknyeon would have seen in his own life. She made him feel somehow inadequate while sweeping kindness through his hair and warming his hands with a charitable grip. But whether or not she was shattering Haknyeon’s perceptions that she should be haughtier, she was speaking of Jedi as though they were real. It was enough for Haknyeon to believe it. 

“I just found it near the outskirts of my family’s farm,” Haknyeon said. Saying it aloud didn’t feel like a sufficient reply but there was nothing else to explain. However Dawon regarded him patiently and he added anything useless that came to mind. “It must have been dredged up when we were reinstalling the irrigation pipes. It was just on the ground floor with other rocks. I saw it because it was shiny and because it was broken into two I decided to keep it to show people. The other half of the stone is with my husband who I am trying to find.”

Dawon leans back and casts her gaze to Soobin who is flipping idly through a book. “What do you think?”

“I don't know,” Soobin said. “Was it definitely you who found it or was it the person who owns the other half?” 

“I found it. Why? Is it important who found the stone?” 

“It’s difficult to say,” Soobin said grandly as she snapped her book shut. She smiled and made very mysterious gestures with her next words. “May the force be with you!”

Dawon offered a smile to Soobin and said to Haknyeon, “have you ever met someone who says such things?”

“Like a Jedi?” Haknyeon thought for a moment. “I don’t think that I have. But I suppose these days I wouldn’t know for certain.”

“You would know,” Soobin said. She skipped over and crouched down and peered over the table Dawon and Haknyeon were seated at. “You’d feel it if you had met someone who was force-sensitive. It isn’t just followers of that religion who know about the people they meet. But it tends to be people from that religion that look down on people who don’t abide by their laws just because as something as base as the biology of the galaxy.”

Haknyeon wasn’t quite sure what Soobin meant. He supposed he was used to feeling unintelligent but he hadn’t expected such a thing even when he came to a place with people as nice as the witches. But there was some part of what Soobin said that Haknyeon had a chance of understanding even though it didn’t strike him as being correct. 

“How would I know?” Haknyeon asked. Soobin smiled, wide and her face softened with charm. But that wasn’t much of an answer. Dawon wasn’t much more help. It was Dayoung who lighted her way into the room and stuttered when she noticed Haknyeon in there. She was the one whose eyes slipped over Haknyeon and then fixed themselves more firmly on Dawon. It was odd that she could act at all surprised to see Haknyeon when she said, “You’re like us. You should know when you meet someone who uses the force because you are capable of using it.” 

Haknyeon still wasn’t sure how that was possible.

He had lived his life raising pigs and hadn’t done anything more complex than that. There was nothing special about him. He hadn’t been snatched from his family by a dying religion and he hadn’t been dragged onto a ship by soldiers who had all the heart trained out of them, nor had he been raised from the ocean with the divine spells of witches. He hadn’t been visited in his dreams by a pair who scoured the azoic spaces between stars for someone to complete the circle they had formed in a preternatural home. Haknyeon hadn't even the kindness of the galaxy itself which bestowed the protection of a planet upon him. 

Even without an interesting way of been torn from his home to make life anew with his awakened abilities Haknyeon was well aware that nothing odd had ever happened around him. He didn't see visions and he didn't experience people giving him his own way or shifting with nothing more than the hardening of his will. He was just a normal person living an ordinary life. He couldn’t even complain about the mundane because it was a life that he enjoyed. He had routine and steadiness and the rhythm of each day was so easy to ride and there was nothing about life on Lothal that had Haknyeon thinking he was anything special. 

He didn’t quite see what these witches would gain by making something like this up though. 

Dayoung walked further into the room and something about her presence compressed the air in Haknyeon’s chest. He leaned back but it did nothing to alleviate the pressure. She came closer still, until she was close enough to extend her arm over Soobin’s head and the table and press her palm flat against Haknyeon’s scalp. 

The long grasses swayed gently while a young child crouched beneath the verdant surface. The child inhaled and exhaled slowly, and tried to be silent and easy despite the earthen grains sticking to their lips and cheek. This was just a game. That was all. There was nothing to be afraid of. There was no reason to let the Hoth-cold horror solidify in their chest. It was important to hide and remain silent. But even if it was important it was just sport. 

A shiver rippled through the malleable stems that sheltered the child. The breaths tore out of the child’s chest, choked whistles and more grit sieved between the child’s desperately parted lips. It was a game but it felt a lot less like a game with the whole world falling in like this.

The child’s friends weren’t too far away but the child couldn’t see anyone or anything, only the blurring grim of the ground below their face. Despite only being able to see the ground, the child’s breathing and the roaring of the wind parting the grass wasn’t enough to blot out the distant screams and the whole world breaking apart.

The explosions in the sky tore everything apart. The child had already seen the first explosion which tore the clouds apart and made the sky bleed. Smoke still billowed from the iron gash in the atmosphere and the stars smeared sickly sorrow over the daylight. Bolts of rage had the air trembling and the child tried their hardest not to sob just as the world was.

Dayoung drew her hand away from Haknyeon’s head. 

It was a day that he remembered distantly, almost as though it had happened to someone else just as Dayoung had shown him, but it was something that he was sure must have been shared by people on many planets that had been the targets of the blanched blanket of soldiers. 

“Did you recognise me when we met again?” Haknyeon asked. Dayoung shook her head. 

“We aren’t the same as those people then.”

Haknyeon didn’t know what that was supposed to mean either. He didn’t know much at all, it seemed, and Dayoung was right about what she said. The Dayoung Haknyeon remembered when he was a child was funny and gentle and hardly ever spoke cryptically like this. 

“But, are you anything like the person I knew when I was young?” Dayoung opened her mouth and Soobin cast a knowing expression up at Haknyeon. Of course. He interrupted before Dayoung could say anything else that didn’t make a jot of sense. “Did we ever meet on Lothal regardless of whether we are different now?”

“We did,” Dayoung confirmed. It was the simplest thing she had said while acknowledging him but it hardly cleared anything up. She had been there for the day Lothal almost died but Haknyeon forgot anything about when he remembered she wasn’t there any longer. She shuffled half a step backwards, further away from letting Haknyeon try to remember, and she said, “The past isn’t where we should live any of our lives. We have to do what we can to secure the present. We should focus on you finding where you are supposed to be.” 

What Haknyeon didn’t expect about the witches helping him was that there would be some training involved. 

“Did you expect us to do everything for you?” Seola asked as she tossed her hair over her shoulder and smiled wryly. 

Haknyeon didn’t expect anything of the sort but just as he didn’t know anything he didn’t come here expecting anything. But equally, he never expected to take to the force with any amount of training even if Seola threatened to slap him over the back of the head each time he fails to do anything.

Thankfully Seola never followed through on her threats of corporal punishment but Haknyeon would have taken every one of those hits over the words she said when the tiny flames flickered low on the melting stalks scattered around the room. She rested her chin in her hands and smiled sadly. “If you can’t focus the force and harness the power of the galaxy I don’t know how we will be able to find your Hyunmin.”

“So you think it’s impossible?” Haknyeon asked.

“I didn’t say that at all.”

Even if Seola didn’t say that she wasn’t saying anything that was helpful enough to cheer Haknyeon up again. He was sure he would never be able to harness any part of the universe or any sort of power soon. He had already tried his hardest for days to no avail. Perhaps if Haknyeon had started in his youth he would have any semblance of control or understanding of what he was supposed to do, but Haknyeon had started behind and he didn’t have years of his life to try to learn how to do anything. He just wanted to find Hyunmin and go home. 

“It’s impossible,” Haknyeon confirmed. “Even if you say it isn’t, the galaxy is so big. I can’t even comprehend that sort of space. He could be anywhere.”

Seola sat up and frowned at Haknyeon. “What makes you say that?”

“Obviously the galaxy is big. There are more star systems than I can count with so much space in between them. And within each of them there are dozens of planets-”

“No, Haknyeon, why are you talking about the size of the galaxy. Didn’t you say that you lost your Hyunmin on Corellia? Even if you want to go on to say that each planet is large, there are a finite number of places he could be.”

Haknyeon shook his head. He would have loved to believe that, just as he had begun this stay believing the witches could help him to do anything, but he couldn’t believe anything counter to the things he knew with resolute certainty. “He’s not here anymore. I can feel it.”

Haknyeon just wanted to quietly be sad and maybe get a hug out of this but Seola didn’t hug him and neither did any of the other witches she called over. They spoke quickly in dialects of languages far beyond Haknyeon's comprehension and it was Yeoreum who threw her arms around Haknyeon's shoulders with choking tightness. 

“You can feel it after all!”

Preparations were soon underway to prepare a starship and Haknyeon thought it was strange to go through such efforts without knowing where exactly they were headed. Especially when Chengxiao paused as she took him to fuel the ship. She handed him some overalls to protect from fuel spills and patted his shoulder sympathetically. 

“We cloak ourselves well enough even if the vessel is cramped because of it.”

Despite being able to use the force Chengxiao had Haknyeon help her manually pull the hose from its reel at the back of the hangar. They dragged the pipe all the way to the underside of a mid-sized starship though Chengxiao did tell Haknyeon not to say anything about her using the force to attach the hose to the fuel port.   

“Are you excited?” Chengxiao asked when they reached the control panel to switch on the fuel pump. Haknyeon raised his gaze from the blinking buttons with indecipherable script written above each one. Chengxiao’s face was hopeful and Haknyeon was sure that even if he wasn’t excited (though it was impossible not to be excited even if things had happened far more quickly than he could shed his reservations) he wouldn’t have been able to disagree with her. 

“I am,” He said, “Thank you for helping me.”

“Right now you’re helping me,” Chengxiao pointed out. Haknyeon wasn’t doing much of anything but she reached for his hand and squeezed it gently. “We would always help someone with a heart like yours. You’re good. That’s how the galaxy led you here.”

Haknyeon didn’t think that was entirely true but he couldn’t disregard the fact that this kindness was unconditional. After hearing all the witches’ stories it made sense to Haknyeon that they would all want to be here with each other and free of all the things in other worlds that had kept them there for so long. 

Even after meeting other good people who offered to help him it seemed the galaxy wanted to show him a path that led to far more answers. Haknyeon hoped the pilots and workers at the resort weren’t too worried about him and they could focus on whatever their lives had been like before he had inconvenienced them. He wouldn’t have a way to pay them back but he wouldn’t have a way to pay back the witches either. But perhaps while with them he would be able to find a way to really do something to show his gratitude to them before disappearing. But he still worried that these people would be yet more who wouldn’t even see a thanks from Haknyeon.

“I am glad that the galaxy brought me to you all. Even if I thought the force was made up for so long it is good that there is a will that brought you all together too. You know each other so well.”

Chengxiao smiled. “We fit well. When I was alone with Eunseo I never thought I would have this many friends. Things are much better like this. Every day we learn.”

“It sounds nice being together with so many people like this,” Haknyeon said. He glanced at the control panel even though he didn't know what it meant. When he looked away from it he felt awkward looking at Chengxiao with a question he couldn't ask but she reached out for his arm. 

“Is there something bothering you about this place?”

There were a fair few things that bothered Haknyeon about this place but they were more to do with the impossibility of the location and its privacy than the question on the back of his tongue. But things were better off said while the chance existed to say them. He didn't want Chengxiao worrying that his thoughts were somewhat different. 

“This place is nice, and I wonder whether it would have been good to end up in a place like this if my life had been different but… But my home is special to me. I have a family there and I don't think I am a good person who could help strangers as easily as all of you. Does living like this ever bother you?”

Chengxiao pondered the question for a while. She said, “You didn't hear my story, did you?”

Haknyeon assumed that he had because he had heard so much about the ways the witches came together. He thought he was safer being polite and he shook his head. Chengxiao smiled in a way that didn't appear entirely genuine. Maybe she knew Haknyeon wasn't certain. 

She delved a hand into one of the pockets of her own overalls and handed it to Haknyeon. He had no idea what it was but he was fairly sure it wouldn’t do anything bad to him. It was delicious even if it could have been something not so benign. 

“On Carlac I literally had nothing. Only Eunseo. It was scary though because we could feel our bodies and minds wasting. Eunseo was so much weaker than me and I hated everything. I hated having to watch each breath take her closer to her end. I hated the fact that we existed in the first place.”

Chengxiao shivered out of the stasis of her own stare and Haknyeon hoped that whatever it was like before had no bearing on her life now. In truth he knew nothing of her loses and difficulties and even if it made him a horrible person he didn't want to know about them. He only wanted to be certain she was living a life that was good to her in a universe that was kind. There were no such guarantees when Haknyeon didn't even know what got her into a situation like that in the first place. 

Slowly, Haknyeon chewed at the snack that he imagined was probably better off warm so the saltiness cut through the broiling oiliness when they're freshly prepared. Chengxiao attempted to smile at Haknyeon and he wondered whether he was supposed to be feeling guilt flooding his chest. 

“You don't feel that way now do you?”

“Of course not,” Chengxiao said gently. At least that was something. 

“How did you get where you were before?” Haknyeon was mostly asking just to be sure Chengxiao wouldn't return somewhere like that again but he could see how the question perturbed her. 

“I would like to know that too,” Chengxiao said wryly. I just knew I existed and Eunseo existed too. There were rocks and far as the eye could see. Even when we flew higher to look further there was still nothing.”

“You could fly? Maybe that's how you got there from where you lived before.”

Oddly, Chengxiao shook her head. “I can show you how we flew but we never lived anywhere else before. We didn't exist before then.”

It was a strange thing to be so adamant about and Haknyeon doubted that possibility existed for such certainty. He wondered whether someone might doubt the things he was sure of just as easily. 

Nobody else that he had met here had seen Hyunmin. Since Hyunmin ran after the thieves there was no proof aside from Haknyeon's word that such a person existed. He wondered whether that's how things were for Chengxiao too. Haknyeon knew her and she must always have existed but perhaps she had not. 

“Hyunmin exists. He’s real,” Haknyeon said, “But he didn’t exist to me until I met him. Or before that, I suppose. Until he crashed his X-wing onto my farm he didn’t exist. Are you sure that you’re not only thinking of yourself from the memories of someone else?”

Chengxiao pouted for a moment, concentrated for a moment perhaps on grasping the tendrils of whatever form her memories came in and attempting to hold onto them that way. “How can I have remembered myself without confirmation from someone else that I existed?”

Haknyeon didn’t expect to hear something like that from Chengxiao and honestly he had no idea what it really meant. Of course she had mind enough to be aware that she existed without needing someone else to tell her. But Chengxiao didn’t say very much after that aside from telling Haknyeon what to do when the starship was filled with fuel so it was difficult to think of much else. 

Perhaps Chengxiao was right to think the way that she did. Haknyeon had been with people his entire life. His family had confirmed his existence well enough for as long as he had lived so he had never spent any time without being sure that he existed because of them. He didn’t like this. He couldn’t stop himself from wondering whether he was only aware of himself because of external influences.

The pipe he and Chengxiao coiled back onto the roll at the far end of the hangar only existed because they were touching it and manipulating it as needed. The ramp onto the starship only existed because Haknyeon and the witches were boarding. The smiles on the witches’ faces as they asked him how he felt about progress like this only existed because Haknyeon could see them and had to form replies to each of them. The kyber hanging around Haknyeon’s neck only existed because it burned as it pressed into his flesh. 

Hyunmin only existed because Haknyeon knew, in the most intangible of ways, that he was careening through a vacuum all the way to the mid-rim planet of Cogalle.  

 

The starship was cramped, smaller on the inside than Haknyeon had imagined since looking at it when the witches had packed and fuelled it. He didn’t mind it though. It was noisy and even more homely than the caverns where the witches had made their home.

“Aren’t you worried that something will happen to your home?” Haknyeon asked. At the very least he supposed there must be dust or moss and leaves that would gather while there was nobody to clean. 

Bona smiled, serene and far more lucid than she had been on the first night. Her fingers idly combed through Yeoreum’s hair on her lap. “Everything is as the galaxy intends it to be.”

Haknyeon wasn't sure he understood. He assumed signs from greater powers were the opportunity for those who believed to act upon what they were receiving. He hasn't ever interpreted it to mean total abandonment was a good idea. 

“Is the galaxy going to protect your home? With the force?”

Yeoreum snickered softly. So she wasn't asleep even if she'd been motionless since Haknyeon had first crawled into the bottom bunk opposite Bona’s in the sleeping quarters of the starship. 

“We can't rely on a home like that. Someone else might find us like you did.”

Haknyeon didn't think he would get through this without a headache. There was a reason his mind contemplated rolling over to nap instead if slouching awkwardly to mirror Bona now that she had stopped gawping at him so openly. 

“Did you not want someone to find you? You all helped me and were mostly kind to me when I arrived.”

“We were all nice,” Yeoreum corrected. It seemed a shame to refute such an emphatic tone but Haknyeon wasn't sure he would say everyone had been kind. He was surprised the first time he had seen Bona emote, but her blank listlessness proved to be a distraction all this time from the scolding he would later receive for not being able to use the force he was allegedly sensitive to. 

“All of you were nice?” Haknyeon clarified. 

“Yes,” Yeoreum said crossly. It was the sort of groundless denial Hyunmin would make and Haknyeon was almost glad to meet someone equally as shameless. Bona pinched at Yeoreum’s cheek and at least Haknyeon could see there was someone with a grain of awareness around. 

“As long as we have each other and the means to travel like in this starship we can enjoy the luxuries of a home,” Bona said. “My dreams of being alive were about meeting friends like these. I don't need such things as a place to be trapped and tracked down by people who might not be so kind.”

That gave Haknyeon pause. He should have given up and gone to sleep when he had the chance instead of awkwardly speaking because he was sure this new lucid Bona was a trick that was being played on him. Her words felt even more like a trick and Haknyeon wondered how offended he was allowed to feel.

“Am I an unkind person?”

“No. You're just very oblivious of the universe. If someone like you could find us by accident then someone whose head is full of mischief might find us just as easily.”

Haknyeon's head hurt. He wondered what his head was full of. He quietly assumed it was not mischief. “Are you saying I am stupid?”

“Why would I say such a thing? I am just glad that someone simple like you was the person to find us.”

It didn't sound like much of a compliment and Yeoreum even tried to hide her face as she giggled through the guise of sleep. Being called simple felt a lot like being called rural and Haknyeon wondered why he disliked it so much. He had exciting thoughts too. He had a zest for adventure, enough to decide on the breath of a feeling that the starship should set course for the mid-rim and orbit its way towards Cogalle. 

This zest for adventure, as fresh as its infancy was, had also been cause for laughter, especially when Meiqi had listened very closely to Chengxiao’s certain interpretation of what Haknyeon had told her. Meiqi had looked very surprised before looking towards Seola and asking whether Haknyeon knew Cogalle had a toxic atmosphere and nothing lived beneath the choppy oceans that stretched infinitely beyond the sky. 

Haknyeon hadn't known anything like that about Cogalle or indeed any of the other planets that were beyond his knowledge. But something in his chest felt like it was homing in on the heart signal between himself and Hyunmin. 

He wasn't like the witches, alleging that their home was the safety in each other. Haknyeon's home was where he had been raised and taught the family business but it hadn't taken long for Haknyeon to realise the place wouldn't feel much like his home if the person he'd married wasn't there. 

There wasn't much else for Haknyeon to think of aside from the distant realisation that he missed KT-GZ almost as much as he missed the pigs (but far less than he missed his mother who must have worried and fretted for as long as Haknyeon had been silent). He supposed he might be simple after all and even admitting that to himself hurt. 

The hurt didn't really stop even when Haknyeon gave up on the nap he had resolved to have. He wandered between all the cramped compartments of the starship, uncertain of why his chest ached so much when he had only offended himself. He was simple and he knew what his home was missing without even being there himself. 

Sleepily, Haknyeon curled up in the cockpit behind Exy’s chair and he listened to the systematic bleeping of buttons on the control panel and the status updates on the starship’s operational functions. 

“Is that comfortable?” Exy asked. It wasn't but Haknyeon was too tired to reply. Boulders of choler crushed down upon his chest and he couldn't even formulate the simple sort of reply that might have been expected of him. He had to do away with politeness. 

“How far from Cogalle are we?” Haknyeon asked. 

Exy stayed quiet as she calculated the distance. She strangely didn't give the answer in distance, though it wouldn't have meant much to Haknyeon if she had. Instead she said, “We'll reach Cogalle in six more Corellian hours.”

Seola almost tripped over Haknyeon when she returned to the cockpit and looked worried as she sat in her seat and passed a pouch drink to Exy.

“I didn't bring one for him.”

 “I doubt he minds.”

Seola shrugged and sipped her own drink before asking the same question Haknyeon had moments before she was surprised at how quickly the reply came.

“How did you know without checking?”

“He only just asked.”

“Oh. I thought all the years we spent searching the galaxy for force signals had made you into an expert.”

Exy laughed. She sank back into her seat and eased into the relief as the sweetness of the pouch drink. “I couldn't tell you how long it would take to walk from one end of our starship to the other.”

“That's because you're inattentive and awful.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Seola didn't answer directly. She waited for Exy to rile herself up on her own denials before she turned to Haknyeon. “Dearest Exy hasn't noticed your unhappiness. Why aren't you so happy to be close to the person you're looking for?”

Haknyeon wondered whether these two who had travelled the galaxy had seen too many planets to remember the explicit details of each one. It hadn't even been a full day ago that Seola had sat beside Meiqi and heard her point out the state of the planet they were headed to. Seola must have been brimming with boundless optimism that her students would pick up anything she threw towards them. 

Haknyeon had picked up everything he could. He picked up tips to use the force and even learned about the spaces between the stars. 

He had picked up how to understand what the feelings that didn't truly belong to him meant. 

“I can't feel him. If Hyunmin is on Cogalle he isn't alive.”

Even Exy was startled out of piloting the starship but Haknyeon hadn't spoken just to get her and Seola to fawn over him and assure him that he was wrong. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i maybe like almost forgot to post this lol so the schedule is barely hanging on atm


	11. Hyunmin the Cargo Pilot

Hyunmin was a good pilot. He knew that being at the helm of a starship was his element. He had missed it since living on Lothal but the controls came to him easily. Xiyeon had only pointed in the general direction of the dashboard when she let him into the cockpit and that was enough. 

Hyunmin knew it was silly to relish the feeling of sitting in one of the firm seats and gripping his fingers around the joystick controls. He didn’t need Xiyeon scoffing at him from the seat beside him. 

“It has been a while,” Hyunmin grumbled. 

“Like that means anything,” Xiyeon said. She tipped her head back against the headrest and called through the open door of the cockpit, “Yehana, you can take you time getting in here. Hyunmin is going to be a while longer enjoying not doing anything.”

“I am going to take off soon,” Hyunmin retorted. He just needed a few more moments to savour the moments before a flight. He hadn’t done this himself in a while. His mouth felt dry and his gut felt tight like it was already prepared for the nausea of being propelled away from the planet faster than his neurons could alert his body to the movement.

There was something far more special about being the one to start the engine and launch a ship into the sky. 

Yehana wasn’t too much longer in checking over the supplies in the luggage compartment of the ship and relaying her count to the other ship. She scurried into the cockpit and closed the door behind herself and KT-GZ. She checked that the droid was plugged into the the port by the door and hurried to seat herself. Once she was strapped into the third seat near the door it was time to take off. 

“Any time now would be great,” Xiyeon said pointedly. 

Hyunmin knew that much and he was just enjoying the last moment. He started the engine and ensured all the lights and monitors were showing positive readings for the fuel and trajectory of the take off. The starship jolted and Xiyeon laughed. She stopped laughing when the ship zoomed through the air and out of the gravitational pull of Corellia. 

The flight got steadier once the starship was in the vacuum of space and Hyunmin was in his element. This was what his entire life had been, albeit on smaller vessels with less readings to monitor to ensure the journey would be a success. The interior atmosphere was at optimal levels and the cargo hold indicated it was secure. The trajectory of the path they would take was fine aside from minor deviations to avoid junk floating through in the nothingness all around. In the far distance stars crackled and exploded billions of years before Hyunmin even got to exist between them. 

“Not bad,” Xiyeon noted when enough time had passed that she didn’t assume Hyunmin was going to veer off into a cluster of debris.

“I’m a good pilot,” Hyunmin huffed.   
“You are!” Yehana agreed. “It was never something I was interested in. I am better at other things anyway.”

“Yeah, remember when you convinced a town on Doreen that you were some big celebrity and you got everything for free?”

“It wasn’t difficult to convince them,” Yehana said with a sparkle of laughter. “Don’t you think I look like a celebrity?”

“Who would know these days,” Xiyeon shrugged. “There are so many people on so many planets and even then there are different countries with their own languages and customs. There aren’t any celebrities anymore. This is an age of anonymity.”

That sounded about right. Hyunmin hadn’t imagined that he would hear Xiyeon, of all people, point out something he had pondered for hours and hours between missions set to inconvenience or destroy the daily lives of so many anonymous people. Even if some people were being oppressed or effected by the rule of some blind government it didn’t mean that the way change was being brought about wouldn’t impact them just the same. 

People disappeared in order to make the galactic politics the most important point of action and it was a selfish sort of joy to find some personal brand of pleasantness amongst the universal poverty. Nobody mattered anymore and there was faceless opulence that many craved that was the hallmark of the enemy because of the provincial impecunity. Hyunmin supposed that was why he didn’t exactly mind that this gang hand kidnapped him and put him at the helm of a starship. It was a freedom. A way to remember himself. A reminder that he needed to keep being selfish. 

“Xiyeon, do you think there will be a time when people matter?”

Xiyeon balked. “Why are you asking me? Ask Yehana I am sure there’s some happy frilly answer that would be nice to hear. Come on, Yehana, say something!”

“You matter lots, Xiyeon!” 

“That’s nice. See that’s the end of that.”

“No it isn’t,” Hyunmin said. He was hoping for much more than the desperation of Xiyeon wanting to move on from the subject as quickly as possible. He genuinely wanted to know. He wanted to know whether Roa’s Pristin were the ones who could help him. Whether these smugglers who were only loyal to credit and coin (and to each other, Hyunmin supposed, though there was plenty of time to discover how that could change) would enable the selfishness that Hyunmin could acknowledge in himself. 

This wasn’t the time to act as though anyone was doing anything good in this war that should have been over a long time ago. Hyunmin loved his friends even after things had changed. But he knew he couldn’t stand by them and watch them become as blind to independence and individuality as the rebels they had at one point helped. 

Hyunmin had lived a life on the fringes of everything, and even if that life had only been a handful of years it had stretched infinitely from the moment he thought he was meant to die. He hadn’t died when he crashed his X-wing after flying as far as he could as long as he could whilst piggybacking on the gravity of asteroids to conserve his fuel cells when the stars he happened across were too far to share their heat with him. Surviving somehow was a second chance and Hyunmin had breathed again and learnt the basics of living somewhere that the war he’d evacuated himself from didn’t matter. 

The signs of the conflict were present on Lothal but even the stormtroopers who patrolled were softer than the soulless entities Hyunmin had been told about who hadn’t a shred of mercy between an entire battalion. Even these soldiers had compassion and interest in the people they met and lives that didn’t revolve entirely around killing and oppressing.  

It might just have been the settlement near Haknyeon’s farm but it was a place beyond the faceless forces at work to control everything. People mattered. 

“You’re all together because you want to be, aren’t you?” Hyunmin asked. Xiyeon looked alarmed that this was still a topic of conversation. 

“Yes.”

“How long have you been part of this group of smugglers?”

“Since I was a small child,” Xiyeon said. “Why do you care? You’re just some pilot who we’ll never see again once we’re rid of your friends. Or maybe even before then.”

Even if they were a handful of lifeforms that would meet for an insignificant speck of time in all the infinities of the universe this was still important. They were all important to themselves and someone else. It didn't matter that no sentient existence mere parsecs away would know they ever existed. These smugglers existed and knowing that much was enough. 

Their intent didn't appear at all incongruous with the thoughts that had Hyunmin hurtling away from ignorant responsibility. 

“I care just because I do,” Hyunmin said. 

“That's nice,” Yehana said cheerily. “There doesn't need to be reason behind everything.”

“If there's no reason to do it in the first place, why bother?” Xiyeon huffed. 

“That's just lazy,” Yehana chides. 

“Isn't it strange though. You say you've been part of these smugglers since childhood but I can't imagine that was entirely by choice. So why are you here now?”

Yehana leaned forward, eyes keen with interest. She must not have heard the answer herself in the time that she had known her. Hyunmin was glad to at least ask the question. Xiyeon looked less glad. Her eyes glanced over to Yehana before she looked at Hyunmin. 

“I like it. These people are my friends. There’s nothing else I could do with my life. It might as well be this.”

“You could sound a bit more glad about that,” Yehana grumbled. 

“Then why are you here?” Xiyeon retorted. Yehana waffled for a moment. Maybe nobody even thought about this sort of thing before being asked by a nosy stranger. 

“I feel like I am meant to be here,” Yehana said as she tapped a finger to her chin. “It is the way things are meant to be. I am supposed to be here to keep everyone company and spend time with them all.”

“And rob and scam people,” Hyunmin interjected. Yehana puffed up her cheeks and frowned. 

“We aren’t doing anything wrong! Roa is doing her best to keep the promises she made. The old leader’s legacy needs to live on through us and Roa is using that to help us survive. If we successfully maintain our trade agreements we will always have currency and we will always be able to survive no matter what happens.”

Hyunmin recalled what Roa had said about credits meaning more than leadership. But she herself was the leader of this gang. “The money that you use, is that more important to you than where you came from?”

“What does it matter when planets die at the whims of leaders? Rather than where we’re from money at least helps us go wherever we want to go.”

Yehana nodded at Xiyeon’s words so even if they never asked each other questions that they couldn’t answer they  agreed on the things that must have been fundamental to the group. But the group had a point of origin, someone who controlled the gravity pulling everyone else in closer.

“What about Roa? Don’t you think you live by her whims?”

“Stop it!” Yehana sad crossly. “Roa loves us just as we love her. She’s doing her best for us and the memories of those who came and went before us.”

Xiyeon nodded. “You talk so much about following leaders when it has already been established that you have no loyalty for the illusion of authority above you. Causing discord isn’t going to make a difference to what you’ll do. You’ll leave after you’ve helped us to get around your friends. Only, you won’t go back to them for a reason.”

“What reason is that?” Hyunmin asked. Xiyeon was right but he wanted to see just how far her theories went, just how correct she thought she was. 

“You said you haven’t been with your friends for years. They don’t know you anymore. They’re strangers to you now.”

“Oh,” Yehana said quietly. KT-GZ awoke from whatever nap it had steeped into since the voyage began. Yehana patted it lightly smiled softly. “You have to leave them because they don’t know you anymore. It is good that you’re trying to remember yourself like that.”

It was nice that Yehana had such a positive view but Hyunmin couldn’t deny that he was afraid. He was turning his back on everything that he had known before. He wasn’t sure how much of that applied to Yehana and Xiyeon, whether Pristin was their everything. Hyunmin was sure that at one point his thoughts had been one and the same as the ones shared by Rainz when it came to the big important things. A shared vision was a daydream away and Hyunmin was finding it harder and harder to recall the details that made it all true. He was waking up too quickly and only realising the way things were in his current situation. 

Part of him wanted more than Xiyeon being standoffish about her replies. He wanted an outright admission that what he was thinking was wrong, that he needed to return to the past he had already fled.

“Aren’t you afraid that the friends you have here won’t know you one day?”

Xiyeon shook her head quickly crossed her legs on her seat. “Monarchs and governments are never universally loved. They don’t know their people and they can’t satisfy the best interests of every one of their people. But Roa can ensure we’re in the best position we could be. She knows it is important to chase the only constant in the galaxy and she knows it is important that we are all heard. Anything can be resolved eventually. But only because Roa knows us all and listens to us. It is a luxury billions of lifeforms could never imagine in all their wildest dreams. And we all know how good we have it so we make sure we never have to be afraid of that.”

It was too late for Hyunmin. “What would you do if you were already afraid.”

“Don’t you mean if our fear was already coming true?” Xiyeon grinned. She needn’t have looked so happy about saying that. But Yehana rested her chin in her hands, smiling sunnily as she interrupted.

“What do you have to be afraid of? You have your own Roa to go back to. And until then you have us.”

 

Hyunmin didn't quite know what he was doing on the flight to Doreen but his brain automatically went through the actions well enough that they were able to shake off the tag-alongs that showed up on the external ship scans way too often. He didn't want to believe that the flight patterns and style were anything like the ones ingrained into his friends and there was no better way to not believe something than to ignore it completely. 

In another universe maybe Hyunmin’s friends were aware that he'd been dragged over to another side and they were trying to rescue him. He wondered whether the Hyunmin in that universe was just as resistant as the one in this universe to the thought of living on false ideals. It seemed hypocritical to think so lowly of the friends he had tried to escape when the people who had kidnapped him were probably worse from an ethical standpoint, but even thoughts like this were unwelcome distractions. Hyunmin had KT-GZ calculate a path before he set the starship into hyperspace to jump to the other end of a star system. He had been instructed not to use the hyperspace paths preprogrammed into the starship as it would be too easy for pursuers to keep up and there was much more at stake that required his mind to be clear. 

He had been alone with his droid for a while since Yehana and Xiyeon had retired to the lounge area of the starship. Hyunmin could have flown them anywhere and there would have been nothing the smugglers could do about it. But Hyunmin stayed the course. He could fly safely and normally after cutting so much of the journey out by travelling faster than light. 

Yehana opened the cockpit door, a clank and a hiss, before sitting primly in the co-pilot seat Xiyeon had vacated a while earlier. It was lucky that the journey was an easy one but Hyunmin doubted Yehana had come to reassure him that there was another sentient failsafe on board. 

“You could warn us whenever you go into hyperspace,” she pouted. 

“Are you telling me that you don't fly often enough to just be used to it?”

Yehana leaned in, way too close and scrutinised Hyunmin’s face. She flopped backwards and sighed, satisfied enough with what she saw to sound very lofty as she said, “You look ill. You don't fly often enough to be used to it either.”

It wasn't as though Hyunmin could deny it. He was far more used to existing in realspace than having to regularly leap onto the partially known dimension of hyperspace which never left him feeling entirely alright when he was employed as a pilot. Both episodic and prodedural memory of the process had failed to prepare him for the reality. 

“I haven't flown in a while,” Hyunmin pointed out just in case Yehana had forgotten all the things she had wheedled out of him. She clearly hadn't forgotten because she folded her hands in her lap and sat up straighter. 

“Oh yeah! Tell me about those big things!”

“Big?” Hyunmin needed more prompting than that. Yehana puffed up get cheeks and struggled to describe something she had never seen before with her own eyes. It wasn't too long before Hyunmin realised what she meant but he let her waffle for a bit longer. He checked the readings on the dashboard and wondered whether he was doing a good job of hiding his laughter from her. 

He interrupted when she started to get annoyed by his ignorance when she was trying her hardest to describe the pigs he had told her about before. It felt strange to be talking about the pigs on the farm back home whilst flying away from the last place he saw Haknyeon. His chest felt dense and weighed Hyunmin down into his seat but he was less certain that it had anything to do with the jaunt through hyperspace. 

Hyunmin was going to return just as soon as he'd lent Roa his loyalty. He tried to push away the thick guilt in his chest that burned to its centre but the sensation only truly dissipated when Xiyeon barged into the cockpit and asked Yehana what she was so happy about.

She squinted disbelievingly at Hyunmin as Yehana said, “Hyunmin lives on a farm but the animals sound charming! They don't sound ugly and smelly like the ones we've seen on farms we've passed before.”

Hyunmin decided not to correct Yehana about the fragrance of pigs. It wouldn't be fair to anyone considering the pigs were rather hygienic and made sure they had neat nests of hay that were far from the place they deposited their waste. The animals were really cool and especially charming. 

“You'd like the pigs if you met them,” Hyunmin insisted. It would have been nice for Xiyeon to be just as enamoured by creatures that were still a mystery to her. 

“I am sure I would like them,” Xiyeon said. She paused but went ahead with whatever occurred to her. “Am I meant to like them though? Don't you raise them to be eaten?”

“Well, yes,” Hyunmin replied weakly, “but that doesn't mean we can't love them.”

“Right,” Xiyeon said. She waved away her incomprehension and squeezed onto the same chair as Yehana. “Anyway, we have a transmission to accept before we reach Doreen. We need to coordinate our meeting.”

Hyunmin thought things would have been simple but he found his attention drifting hither and thither while Xiyeon negotiated a place for the starship to land with a contact on Doreen. They talked for so long that they reached the Doreen system before Xiyeon was done and she seemed more cross than anything that Hyunmin would have got them to their destination so quickly. 

“Yuha, you're going to need to give us a location now,” Xiyeon huffed. “We're closing in on the Doreen orbit and it wouldn't be great for us to get caught before we could even trade for some of the supplies to get to the imperial academy.”

“It's only on Lothal,” Yuha muses. “Even with the fancy name they'd probably let you off without even being disguised.”

Hyunmin couldn't help but perk up at that. He wasn't sure quite how much he had missed because he didn't recall Lothal being mentioned in the initial plan explained by Kyla. “What are you talking about the imperial academy for?”

Yehana rolled her eyes and whispered exaggeratedly to the comm unit on the dashboard. “That's Hyunmin’s home.”

“You're a stormtrooper? You really needn't bother faking credentials then.”

“No, Yuha, Lothal is his home. He's got issues where he can't do anything that doesn't directly benefit himself.”

“Don't you have the same condition?” Hyunmin retorted. Nobody refuted it but they didn't admit it either which left Hyunmin feeling like he'd experienced an injustice. He felt sulky and wondered whether his tone would deter any possible responses. “I thought we were going to Nubia and this was just a stop along the way.”

“It's sad that you'd think that seeing as Nubia and Corellia are both in systems in the same region. There isn't any universe where it would make sense to come all the way out to the mid-rim just to go back to the core worlds,” Xiyeon said. The worst part was how genuinely sympathetic she sounded as she requested Yuha transmit the landing location. 

Hyunmin guessed that he should have paid attention to a great many more things considering he would have done better with the landing had he known the target was moving. He barely avoided sinking through the Doreen atmosphere and directly into the choppy ocean. His heart hammered against his chest, relief making his muscles sag at the near-miss. He shouldn't have let hearing about Lothal interfere with his already waning focus. He needed to get through the trade here on Doreen before he could even consider Lothal. 

As he prepared to disembark with Yehana and Xiyeon he quietly asked KT-GZ how likely it would be for him to end his part in this smuggling operation on the planet he'd intended to return to. The astromech wasn't optimistic but Hyunmin supposed he'd need to leave Lothal again just to find Haknyeon and make sure he'd stay there for as long as they both lived.  

 

Doreen was a sight to behold. As far as the eye could see was ocean. The curvature of the planet held enough tension that it barely seemed like they were safe from sailing right of the edge of the world and into the gaping red maw of the aged sun. 

The sky above was a wash of white, the hottest of flames frozen in a single moment of fission to become the eternal calm of sharp air that scratched at Hyunmin’s face. The grit of the air already reddened Yehana’s cheeks and Xiyeon too looked young. She looked cute, a world away from the haughty smuggler who didn’t think much of Hyunmin at all. It might have had something to do with how she had constantly been enveloped in the arms of a humanoid with pink hair that flowed down her back as she fulfilled her purpose of holding Xiyeon in her arms. 

“This is Eunwoo,” Xiyeon said proudly as she patted Eunwoo’s hair. “She’s really cool, right? I am so glad to see her again after being forced to hang out with you for so long.”

KT-GZ bleeped admonishments that Xiyeon only stuck her tongue out at. Hyunmin could at least respond coherently. “Nobody forced you to spend time with me.”

“Roa did!” Xiyeon retorted. 

“How could she be so mean?” Eunwoo cooed sympathetically. She hugged Xiyeon close to her chest and sent a withering look Hyunmin’s way. “You can’t be that good of a pilot that you’re even boring so Xiyeon needs to suffer being around you.”

“I’m the one suffering, I’m here against my will.” Hyunmin grumbled. 

“If nobody had mentioned Roa I might not have believed you,” Yuha said thoughtfully as she came out of the storage hold of the starship. It seemed more as though she had been listening to the conversation outside instead of verifying the inventory onboard but she was sort of on Hyunmin’s side so he wasn’t going to take that for granted. 

Hyunmin went on being on Doreen against his will as Yuha and Eunwoo (with Xiyeon clamped tightly onto her) led them from the sprawling deck where starships came to roost. Below the surface was a town sailing  after the setting of the sun. Layers and layers of of units with people from all over the galaxy searching for the safety to gamble and swindle to their hearts’ desire. 

It was somewhere below the landed starship that Hyunmin was introduced to two smugglers with oil-stained clothes and scars on their hands. Hyunmin hoped the scars were from mechanical work but moments after meeting it seemed more likely that the scars were earned from scraps and brawls with those who disliked their dealings. 

“We’re not interested.” It was the smuggler named Hana who spoke, kicking her feet onto the table where she sat and looking away from where they stood. It felt like begging even though Hyunmin had assumed they were here with intent. 

“Don’t be like that,” Yuha said unctuously. She was brave. She even reached out for Hana’s shoulder yet Hyunmin was sure she was the very person who warned Hyunmin not to even look to long at her. 

“Don’t be like what?” Mimi sat across the table from Hana, shuffling and counting multicoloured stacks of credits from all around the galaxy. “We’re not interested in whatever you’re trying to flog us.”

“It’s all legitimate and above board,” Yuha wheedled. She reached for Yehana and pushed her forwards. “You’re cuter, you tell her.”

Yehana cast a betrayed glare over her shoulder at Yehana but crouched at Mimi’s side and fluttered her eyes. Mimi didn’t deviate for a second from her counting even as Yehana’s hand crept closer to her. 

“Don’t our groups have such a good relationship? Are you saying you want to renege on our contract like this when we’re such good friends?”

Mimi slapped Yehana’s hand away and continued counting. Yehana wailed and Hyunmin wondered whether anyone saw things going this way. But after a moment Mimi stopped. She scooped the credits into a bucket at her feet. She lifted her gaze and pulled Yehana’s hand into her grasp. 

“Contracts are important, you’re right. But your lot has voided many contracts before now.”

“Have we?” Yehana asked in a wavering voice. She tried to pull away but Mimi didn’t relinquish her grip. Xiyeon was about to intervene (probably far more violently than necessary) when Hana laughed and dropped her feet from the table. 

Hana moved to stand and helped Yehana up from the ground with a smile that almost appeared kind. Objectively she was beautiful so Hyunmin supposed she would often appear kind even if her intentions weren't quite magnanimous. 

“Come on, Mimi,” Hana said cheerily. “Let's see what Pristin are trying to scam us with.”

It was an odd sort of procession, following Hana and Mimi who had Yehana tethered between them. What surprised Hyunmin the most was how easily Yuha, Eunwoo and Xiyeon had let it all happen. 

He had been told about Hana and Mimi prior to meeting them but there wasn't much he could say besides the fact they're representatives for another group of smugglers. He could only assume they weren't entirely honest and Hyunmin wondered whether those sorts of presumptions were hypocritical. 

Across the galaxy there was a similar distrust of Corellians and Hyunmin decided against forming a negative opinion of those he didn't know. All the same he thought it was strange. 

Xiyeon rolled her eyes as she walked alongside him. “They're dangerous. Only an idiot would challenge them.”

“There's only two of them,” Hyunmin pointed out. 

“There are only two that we can see,” Xiyeon corrected. “They might not think much of us because of some mix-up or other but they never stray too far from the rest of their gang. They can play with us because they know there aren't many more of us here on Doreen.”

Hyunmin didn't want to call Xiyeon and the others silly but he didn't understand the merits of leaning so hard into a tactical weakness. Hana and Mimi knew nothing of Hyunmin so keeping him back to call on when trouble arose would have been much more helpful than having him trail along behind like yet another detainee. Of course, Hyunmin remembered, that was exactly his identity. All he was good for was to stand quietly and watch and be watched. 

Pristin might have been able to afford losing Hyunmin but perhaps not before the trade was done. He needed to remain within reach as Mimi was sent into the cargo hold with Yuha to verify the amounts of stock. They still needed Hyunmin around to help lug merchandiser from Pristin’s starship on the sun-crisped rooftop to Hana’s ship dozens of casinos, bars and cantinas away. 

 

Hyunmin wasn’t sure how he ended up free. In a way. He was still on Doreen but there wasn’t a familiar face among the cacophony of languages where lifeforms from all over the galaxy chatted, swindled and flirted. 

Perhaps it wasn't true freedom if his companion had been extracted from him so expertly. 

Already he could tell someone was trying to swindle him out of something. He shouldn't have engaged in the first place but he was too used to having someone around him and the cheerily chirping voice of Yehana had yoked away a while ago. He must just have been tired from transporting several units between two barely legitimate cargo ships so his attention was easily captured by the person waving him over. 

He should have committed to getting lost when he had the chance. 

“Have a drink.”

Hyunmin debated running away but he felt awkward about making eye contact and then dashing off. For all he knew this could have been one of Hana’s dangerous friends who wanted to play around with Pristin and knew Hyunmin for what he was. Then again this person was continuously shuffling tokens between hands and making a milliard small piles. It reminded Hyunmin distantly of Mimi only thus was a lot less obnoxiously lavish. He felt far more sorry for wanting to turn this down. 

“I'm afraid I don't have any credits.”

A shake of the head. Unseeing eyes stared right through Hyunmin and the motions of hands stuttered only for a moment as a cup was pushed across the table towards Hyunmin. 

“I won't have you go thirsty in my presence.”

“I am fine anyway. You should save your drink for yourself.”

“No.” A rattle punctuated the word the arcane murmurs of something that set Hyunmin’s teeth on edge. His feet were rooted to the spot in an organic arrest on this synthetic craft. “Drink, else we'll have your life to go with that crystal of yours.”

Hyunmin really should have run off when he had the chance, no matter how many minor collisions it took to escape this being. As it was he was unable to move. 

“Crystal?” 

A blink shuttered the milk blind eyes from sight for the barest of moments as the hands ceased their shuffling and pointed to Hyunmin’s chest. 

Someone bumped into Hyunmin as they passed but that only broke the spell enough to let him feel for the crystal that hung around his neck. His feet were still fused where he stood and he wondered what it would take to undo the welding of the strange someone with no eyes to see him with. 

The crystal was still there and he was thankful a furtive reach when his attention was absent hadn't stolen the stone away from him. He needed it. His reminder of Haknyeon wasn't the only thing that kept him motivated to return home but it was the only proof outside of his mind that he'd lived any of his dream of Haknyeon. 

“Drink,” the person instructed. “Complete the wager.”

“I don't want to though,” Hyunmin said quickly. 

A smile, or not quite, greeted the refusal and a bladed pressure sank into the layers of Hyunmin’s skin. So far he was uninjured but he could easily understand the threat pointed into his chest. 

“Drink.”

“If I drink and play your stupid game once will you let me go.” 

“Of course.”

“And you won't try to trick me if I win.”

“Let's not worry about that. You shan't win.” 

The voice was so matter of fact that Hyunmin didn't want to believe even that. However it was the closest to a guarantee of escape that he'd get from this strange customer in the cantina. He swept the cup into his hand and swigged the oily liquid inside. He swallowed it back against every plea from his body to spew it back up again but ignoring his body earned him the ability to shift his weight and pry his boots from the ground. 

“Sit.”

Against his wished to do otherwise, Hyunmin sat at the available seat. 

“Choose an emblem.”

Six tokens were laid on the table between Hyunmin and the probable con artist. There wasn't a semantic meaning that Hyunmin could glean from the images carved into the tokens and Hyunmin wondered whether the rough hewings were the handiwork of the person who placed them in a row. 

Without knowing what the tokens signified Hyunmin could only imagine what sort of game this was intended to be. He hesitated over several tokens and wondered which of these was least likely to condemn him to a loss. 

Cautiously Hyunmin glanced up at the dealer. He shouldn't have been so surprised by the beatific countenance there. Of course one could relax when they were guaranteed to get their own way with some mystical hypnotism. Hyunmin didn't have such luxury and he'd wished he could view himself from the perspective opposite. He had nothing of value and he didn't see what would make him an excellent attractive target when pockets jangled all around the cantina under the load of credits. There was nothing like that about Hyunmin’s person. 

Except for the stone he shared with Haknyeon. He couldn't imagine it could be seen where it was tucked away beneath the layers of his clothes but this person made him prey because of it. It wasn't much of anything, an aquatic-shade hardened to a shine, and if Hyunmin was honest he hadn't thought much of it when Haknyeon had happily presented both halves of it to him. 

It was the seamless way the stones fit together that convinced Hyunmin that there was a reason to be impressed. The stones sat flush as surely as the hands of their owners and Hyunmin couldn't give something like that up easily. 

“You can take your time. But I can imagine taking longer to contemplate your choice will only make the loss hurt more when I claim my winnings.”

It was a taunt, as plain as one could be here, and Hyunmin understood the futility of waiting as easily as that of making the decision on a whim. Perhaps taking another minute to consider would have helped him to win or perhaps it would have left him more disappointed in making the wrong decision. So he threw himself into the trap instead of resisting only to fall in anyway. 

He picked the token with the most lines carved scruffily into it. The token was heavy and oddly warm against the palm of his hand and he hoped it was a good sign despite being certain of the contrary. He passed the token across the table only to have his wrist grabbed to secure him in place. 

Searching hands inspected the token. It was a detailed deceit simply to leave the impression that Hyunmin could somehow have won and escaped with everything he owned. He already knew he was right not to believe it when his captor squeezed his wrist and replaced the token in the row. 

“Bad luck, traveller.”

“It's not luck. You've forced me into a game that doesn't make sense.”

“Living is assent enough.”

Rough hands yanked Hyunmin closer and there was only the briefest fumble of fingers before the stone was pulled taut on its chain. The tug was painful more for the fact of Hyunmin’s helplessness as the chain snapped. 

“You can't take that, please!”

The plea went unanswered as the stone was tucked away in a fold of fabric and Hyunmin was shoved away. As much as he wanted to reach out for what belonged to him his muscles were loathe to obey. 

“You have nothing else. You may go.”

“No, that's not fair! You have to give that back!” Hyunmin could appreciate how weak he sounded saying things like this when this was happening precisely because anyone could do whatever they liked on Doreen. Ownership was a flimsy concept at best on the flooded planet and there wasn't any enforcement of justice or civility. 

It was the perfect place for uneven trades for those on the right side; those with wealth of coin and workers and associates did far better than those with nothing. Hyunmin had absolutely nothing. 

And then something painfully solid rammed into Hyunmin’s leg. He could just about move in the confines of absence to take a look at the projectile. 

“KT!”

The astromech bleeped shrill and loud over the chatter and catchy music in the cantina. Hyunmin’s captor recoiled and the shackles of stasis melted away. But as Hyunmin launched himself towards the gambler an arm hooked around his chest and was joined by several more that dragged him backwards. 

Considering the racket he had made protesting his loss Hyunmin was unsurprised that his struggle against the forces dragging him further away from the stove went unnoticed. Even KT-GZ whistling and whirring didn't draw any interest from the cantina patrons. Everyone was minding their own business far too well to be natural. He realised another thing about the way this world worked as his feet skidded against the ground. 

Unless they had no choice there wasn't anything to make a person react. 

Hyunmin didn't have too much longer to lament the will of a bystander to not intervene. He managed to prise away part of the grip but his efforts only got him dumped on the grimey floor outside the cantina. KT-GZ bumped into him roughly and he found himself staring up at Eunwoo and Xiyeon. 

“Oh. It's you.”

Xiyeon rolled her eyes. “We kept telling you to stop making a fuss.”

Hyunmin hadn't heard anything but he supposed it would be difficult to do so over his yells for assistance. Then he remembered the other reason he had to fuss. 

“That person stole my stone. I need to get it back.”

“Leave it,” Eunwoo said quickly. She hefted Hyunmin to his feet and dragged him away from the cantina. On another world Hyunmin would have wondered what this looked like. But on Doreen nobody looked and nobody cared no matter how many parlours and bars they passed swiftly. Maybe people like these all over the galaxy were the reason for a traveller to get displaced and lost and kidnapped by friends and makeshift allies. 

It had been a while since Hyunmin moved as his own choice. Even if he stood still on Doreen the current would sway him elsewhere if the ship's engines ceased. Hyunmin wanted some say in wherever his astromech followed him. He dug his heels into the ground. 

“Why should I leave it? It's all I have. I never chose this like you.”

“You did once,” Xiyeon said quietly. 

“Since then I have chosen an alternative. I have a proper home and belongings. I am not going to forget all that just because you're letting people rob me as though it's nothing.”

“In that case you don't really need the stone then, do you,” Xiyeon said. She was being contrary for the sake of it but Hyunmin wasn't going to smile and laugh along because this was the sort of haughtiness he had grown to accept and enjoy. She wasn't the princess he had raised.

“I want to go home. But I can't so I want something to keep with me that feels like something even close to that,” Hyunmin said. Xiyeon held fast against the firm of Hyunmin’s tone and it was Eunwoo who crumbled. 

“You have to let it go. It was that or your life. No. If you died you would have lost both.” 

It sounded even sillier when Hyunmin heard it like this but he was acutely aware that he was stupid enough to need the situation broken down like this. Seconds previously he said he wouldn't forget all the things that the stone represented yet he knew just as well it was something inherent to his comfort while he was adrift. 

There was a time when the prospect of losing his life sounded far less daunting; for a while it would be heroic, after that it was his duty, more recently than that it was something he wouldn't have minded while he had nothing aside from his will to escape. He had somewhere to return to and collecting Haknyeon on the way was his new will. The overarching goal was to find a way to make it all up to Haknyeon and fix the things that were within his power. He hoped there was a future where he might make up with friends he'd known even earlier but he wasn't counting on that when he'd run away. He didn't have the blaster he took that time (nor did he have the X-wing he took the first time he fled) but losing escape souvenirs wasn't quite the same as losing something that mapped so perfectly against Haknyeon's heartbeat and was all the evidence Hyunmin needed that he was trying to be found. 

Hyunmin wouldn't be able to find him at all if he died because of some unfair gambling. That was the only problem. 

The thing was Eunwoo looked genuinely worried. She had only met Hyunmin hours ago and as desperately as she clung to Xiyeon’s sleeve she cast apprehension too. It wasn't anything Hyunmin had the heart to put up a fight against. 

He nodded. “I'll give it up then.”

“Thank you,” Eunwoo said quietly. The decision wasn't made for her but Hyunmin couldn't give a voice to that claim when the opposite seemed so certain. 

 

For all Eunwoo’s concern before, Hyunmin was flabbergasted when he was woken from the cargo hold of the starship the next day to go gambling. 

Eunwoo didn't explain much more aside from the fact that he had to go with her order else. If his presence was so important he would have hoped for the luxury of a bed but he was already resigned to the fact that was far beyond what he was allowed. At last he had KT-GZ with him to project some hazy memories in the echoing solitude of the cargo hold. Privacy was worth something. 

He stretched as well be could while being threatened with some vague and perilous consequences of not following Eunwoo closely enough. She was spry as she leapt ahead of Hyunmin and complained to KT-GZ about him dragging his feet. 

“Where are the others?” Hyunmin asked as he dodged a feeble punch from Eunwoo that was a poorly aimed threat rather than anything resembling genuine violence. There were many strange things about these circumstances that he couldn't quite work out and he hoped even a partial explanation would help. However Eunwoo shrugged and patted their astromech companion on the superior face. 

“They just didn't want to come.”

“What if I don't want to either,” Hyunmin pointed out. KT-GZ unfortunately was babbling against him and Hyunmin wondered whether the pair of them were conspiring against him. 

“You don't get a choice,” Eunwoo replied flippantly. “You're pretending to be our slave for today so we can lull our rivals into a false sense of security.”

“I don't think this slave thing is pretend. After all the heavy lifting I had to do yesterday I would definitely believe I am a slave. Not even a service droid would have to do that much.”

KT-GZ babbled indignantly but Hyunmin wasn't about to spare any sympathy. 

A monorail took them to the other end of the titanic ship that sailed the empty surface of Doreen. There were many stops along the way which were close to casinos and entertainment establishments that Hyunmin had only heard rumours of on the backs of cosmic winds. The neon signs flickered through the dark windows and the flashes of eternal night made Hyunmin’s eyes ache the longer he stared as they journeyed. KT-GZ updated them on the location, counting the remaining stations between them and their destination each time the train stopped. Hyunmin was ready to get annoyed about the fact the droid did this much as though he couldn't count but Eunwoo grabbed his elbow. 

“Let's get off here instead.”

The droid was also offended at such a suggestion but there was nothing it could do but follow as Eunwoo led them through several streets and alleyways. 

Eventually they came to a stop at a dead end that was neither outdoors nor indoors. Of course the entire civilisation on the surface of Doreen was indoors but the infrastructure between destinations looked vastly different to the grimey interiors of bars piped with recycled air and harsh lighting. Out here everything glowed violet, strips of lights lined the ground and the artificial sky up above. It was strange considering Hyunmin had seen Doreen’s true sky upon arrival and the stretching arc or aquamarine atmosphere felt a world away from the cloying dim of mystique. 

Eunwoo’s hair seemed to span the spectrum of ultraviolet under the lights and she stepped forwards to stand alone before the inverted landscape of aquatic leaves painted as a morose mural on the wall. 

She was beautiful, and Hyunmin wondered whether this made many more follow her to a death this serene. 

She glanced at Hyunmin over her shoulder, an uncertain set of her lips straining into resolve. She looked back at the rippling lilacs painted over the wall in front of her. Hyunmin wasn’t sure quite how it happened but the wavering ahead moves more erratically in the murky mauve  before they wobbled right from view and the dappled fuscia flora faded to a narrow light to reveal an opening behind the wall. And Eunwoo stepped right through it. 

KT-GZ squeaked in concern and Hyunmin agreed. But he wasn’t here to watch Eunwoo walk away. Pretending to be a slave wasn’t any better but he supposed he needed to at least do that much. 

It was colder on this side of the violet veil and Hyunmin’s shiver was immediately followed by him withdrawing his hand away from the ice of KT-GZ’s lid. Eunwoo looked back again to ask Hyunmin what was taking him so long and he tried to hurry up.

Apparently there was even further this way they could go. Hyunmin didn't trust any of it but he had to trust Eunwoo. For all Xiyeon’s jibes Hyunmin didn't believe for a minute that any of this group resented him. Not even Roa did really. It was just a feeling Hyunmin had but he was certain of it. Roa was under a lot of stresses and pressure that Yehana was very vague about and it only made sense that she'd have a shorter temper than the others. Regardless, there never seemed any ill will towards Hyunmin. So there wasn't any sort of trap here. Eunwoo had already saved Hyunmin once and there wasn't a point in that if the next step was to lead him somewhere dyed in seclusion just to get rid of him. 

Eventually the path became more similar to the street they had left behind, though the hyacinth hue remained. And then they were immersed in the star burst crush of species from all over the galaxy moving and talking and trading on the street they turned down. 

Hyunmin was careful to keep KT-GZ within arm's reach while asking Eunwoo to slow down for them both. It seemed excitement had quickened her pace but she altered her pace to suit them. It wasn't too long before they eased their way out of the crowd to end up at a parlour with tabled upon tables of patrons drinking and gambling. Eunwoo paid the entry charge for herself and Hyunmin and made straight for a table that Hyunmin assumed to be a random selection. He dithered with his astromech and was patient with the same journey between the seats and luggage and customers obstructing the gangways. 

The table was not random. 

“You’re late.”

“I haven’t been here for a while. I got mixed up with my stops,” Eunwoo explained with a smile. 

The two people already sitting at the table didn't smile along with her but there was some nuance of entertainment turning up the corners of their mouths. 

“It was very generous of you to bring your fee for losing.” The one who spoke this time was as slight as the other but Hyunmin couldn't help but wonder what had sparked the distant look in their eyes. Even when their gaze roved over KT-GZ and onto Hyunmin the stare was focused on a point far less physical than real space. 

“I don't intend to lose this time.” There was something roguishly attractive about the intent in Eunwoo’s words and Hyunmin thought she had perfected what it meant to be truly cool. She turned on the holotable and flickered through several options before the other person on the other side of the table scoffed. 

These eyes that stared at Hyunmin this time had no business seeing into hyperspace and the weight of this sight was too much. It was only fitting when the same weight made Eunwoo’s hands falter as the person said, “She meant your fee for losing last time.”

“Ah.” Eunwoo looked askance at Hyunmin and gulped. She was clearly rattled and Hyunmin was only more annoyed by her pretending otherwise when she was wiping away the apology in her face towards the prize. “How about we play double or nothing?”

Getting his head around Eunwoo’s sudden change of heart towards gambling was not going well but Hyunmin had to do some pretending himself just so be wouldn't undermine any part of this persona. It turned out that Sally (with her dreamily distant eyes which made the beauty in her face far too mysterious for the anonymity of a hidden casino on Doreen) and Soyee (whose innocent looking face was surely a deception fit for her sport) were associates of Hana and Mimi. The fact didn't worry Eunwoo at all, or she was keen on affecting that level of blitheness, whereas Hyunmin struggled to focus on the rules of the game as he tried to detect the subterfuge which was the reason for the game in the first place. He didn't want to let his guard down simply because Sally had been considerate enough to explain the relatively simple gameplay. 

It was a case of matching small stone tablets to the image projected above the holotable. Several times Hyunmin lost his turn because he assumed he was looking for the identical image rather than the extension of the pattern. It wasn't until Eunwoo pinched his leg hard and hissed that he was doing it all wrong that he realised his astromech wasn't telling him off for no reason. 

Eventually Hyunmin managed to force himself to focus on the images and search for the patterns in the game rather than the patterns of Sally and Soyee cheating. It was likely that they weren't cheating though. Hyunmin appeared to simply be bad at playing the game. 

“I can’t tell if you’re getting better of you’re just giving up,” Sally grinned when matching the continued pattern that Hyunmin failed to identify. It seemed like a superfluous detail for Sally to scoop an armful of credits that were stacked up by Eunwoo so carefully when she promised herself to playing. The holograph of the pattern floating in the air wavered erratically and Hyunmin closed his eyes against the flickering fuzz against his eyeballs. 

“Hyunmin wouldn’t give up,” Eunwoo said staunch in her defence of him. “He’s not allowed to anyway.”

“Is that because you trained him?” Sally asked. She sounded genuinely curious and Eunwoo’s face went as hot as her hair. “That’s right. He’ll do his best for all of us.”

“Does that apply to us when we win him?” Soyee asked. It was a fair enough question but he didn’t want to hear whatever answer Eunwoo would provide. He didn’t have a choice seeing as she was pressing her foot down hard onto his toes beneath the table.

“There isn’t a better slave in all the galaxy. Not that you’ll get to find that out. Hyunmin, I order you to start winning!”

It wasn’t the most helpful of orders, especially as Hyunmin wasn’t such a slave who would be able to perfectly succeed when given a command like that. He wasn’t failing in his attempts to play the game just to lull their opponents into a false sense of security but he couldn’t be certain that Eunwoo hadn’t fooled herself into thinking that too.

Somehow the game started to go his way. Hyunmin didn’t understand how the patterns he hadn’t noticed fit seamlessly in his mind’s eye with the projection in front of them. It was even stranger after the third win that even tiles Hyunmin shared with Soyee or Sally weren’t recognised until he saw them. Until now they’d been much more observant than he had been. 

It wasn’t until well after Eunwoo had cashed them out and they were had stepped through the violet veil that the game made more sense to Hyunmin. KT-GZ trundled along behind them and Eunwoo slung her arm over Hyunmin’s shoulder. 

“You’re good,” Eunwoo cheered. “You’re a champion.”

“How did you get my droid to hack into that holotable and manipulate the game?”

Eunwoo frowned. “I did no such thing! If your droid did something like that it had nothing to do with me!”

They were at the monorail stop surrounded by many sketchy people who would have loved to have a droid spontaneously rig games for them but Hyunmin knew that sort of thing was impossible. 

“What did you do, Eunwoo? A droid can’t do anything without it being programmed.”

Eunwoo tapped her finger to her chin and let out a great sigh of exasperation. “I wonder. Perhaps KT is broken and must be sent off for reprogramming.” 

“I’ll send KT off as soon as possible,” Hyunmin grumbled. KT-GZ had something to say about that and rammed into Hyunmin’s legs again whilst whistling loudly. Several commuters looked over in interest and Hyunmin wouldn’t blame them at all. He tried his best to assure KT while Eunwoo didn’t care at all. Of course it wasn’t her droid being threatened with reprogramming. 

“You can keep pretending but I need to know how you managed to get that set up without Soyee or Sally noticing. Yesterday you were all going on about how dangerous gambling is and how dangerous Hana and her associates are but now you’re brazenly stitching them up and making them angry. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“I didn’t stitch them up,” Eunwoo said. She pushed Hyunmin onto the monorail carriage and held out an arm to ensure KT-GZ was following. “They were going to give us the supplies anyway. Probably. I just wanted to be more certain that we’d be able to get uniforms that looked authentic.”

Hyunmin didn’t have a clue what that meant. If a trade was sure to happen it would make a lot more sense to just do it simply rather than to cheat at gambling. It might just have been that Hyunmin had been too far from home and everyone with attitudes of the likes he had grown up with but he couldn’t remember wanting to go about things like that. Honesty was easier to keep track of. His thoughts weren’t far off seeing as Eunwoo had avoided explaining anything about the strange plan. 


	12. Haknyeon Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh like 100% please skip this chapter. it's all just a wacky dream but i just read it over and there is like cannibalism in this so if you're reading just give up forever now or skip to the next chapter

It was the knocking against the hull of the starship which woke Haknyeon. It was persistent and loud enough to be coming from within Haknyeon’s head. Perhaps that was all the substance of the sound because he rolled out of his bunk, unsteady on his feet, and looked over some of the witches who were resting peacefully in their own bunks. 

The knocking got louder. Haknyeon wasn’t sure what sort of creature could do that but he couldn’t lie and wait for it to pass just in case it never did pass and he could have prevented something horrible. 

The knocking was almost constant and quietened under the whoosh of doors opening and hisses from the ventilation shafts that Haknyeon passed but he knew that he had to follow the sound. Even when he was led to the repair hatch Haknyeon knew that he had to follow the knocking which was almost rattling the hatch off its hinges. 

The door behind Haknyeon whooshed closed behind him and the airlock on the room began its countdown without any intervention. Haknyeon didn’t panic about not wearing any of the correct equipment. Things were fine as they were. So Haknyeon waited for the countdown to run out and for the repair hatch to open.

Once Haknyeon was outside of the ship things were less fine than he had been led to believe because the rail he held onto as he climbed out of the vessel fractured and Haknyeon was left to plummet through space and right into the toxic ocean of Cogalle. 

Being tossed about in these waves should have felt like dying but his skin wasn’t melting off his bones.

This wasn’t like the days before or any of the warnings he had been given by the witches. The suits they had to wear were stifling to the point that Haknyeon wondered whether it really was any easier to breathe in the Cogalle atmosphere. With no protection at all Haknyeon could easily tread water and keep himself afloat as he gazed over the waves which sloshed acrid water into his mouth. Dense mist blocked his vision in every direction but it still wasn’t an impossible place to exist.

Haknyeon didn’t know how long he was treading water in the ocean before he bumped into a very large something. He wasn’t sure whether he had somehow drifted in the current or something had sailed towards him but when he tried to turn to see what he had encountered, uncountable arms dragged him out of the water. 

He was only a sopping mess on the corrugated dock for a short moment. And then Hyunmin took his hand and they walked towards land where their kids were jumping up and down in the sand. Hyunmin had always wanted to come to Praya for a holiday. Haknyeon couldn’t remember Hyunmin actually saying it but it was something that he supposed he already knew. He was glad that even with all the difficulties they had been able to come here together and have a nice time. 

“It’s almost like a honeymoon,” Hyunmin grinned as he squeezed Haknyeon’s hand tight. 

“Almost?” Haknyeon asked. Hyunmin responded only by pointing towards their children. 

Sowmi and Piggly ran towards them and latched onto each of their hands. Right. They had kids who were almost always miss them. Neither of them would want to leave their precious children behind. Which was why it felt so much worse when Haknyeon was no longer holding onto Sowmi’s hand. 

Haknyeon wanted to be a good parent he didn’t want to lose one of his children so easily. He dragged Hyunmin and Piggly towards the sloping shore but Sowmi was nowhere to be seen. Haknyeon led them back up to the pier but nowhere along the decking were there any signs of  Sowmi. They stood at the end of the pier and looked out towards the darkening blue of the ocean. 

The whole world shook, the pier beneath them rattled and even the air around them vibrated and Praya seemed like a different sort of world entirely with the shift towards evening something that fractured the planet just for temporary darkness. The black that was bleeding into everything, turning the crystal sea murky, and the sky close, and everything tremble violently was being dragged out of everything, Haknyeon could feel it being dragged out of himself and the others and even the inanimate features of their surroundings. 

Nighttime didn’t fall the way it should have. All along Haknyeon should have known that this wasn’t the correct sort of night. He stepped closer to Hyunmin and Piggly and he wished that Sowmi was safely here with them. 

Night burst from the depths of the black ocean and Haknyeon fell into the nothingness which pressed all around him. He could feel Hyunmin’s hand in his own and he was certain that Piggly was still with them even though he wasn’t sure whether he was floating or falling or not moving at all. 

And then Haknyeon opened his eyes. He climbed up from the floor, unsteady on his feet and almost fell right over again when he found Mina standing in front of him. He hadn’t seen her since she led him to the space witches. The only light in the dark, she held her hand out to Haknyeon. All he could do was take her hand into his own even though it is already falling away from his own skin. 

Mina walked slowly ahead until her path converged with two others like herself, shimmers of light smiling warmly. They walked ahead of Haknyeon until they reached a long table. 

Two human children were sitting in the centre of the table and waved happily when they saw Haknyeon behind Mina and her friends. They were his children. That was the only answer and they answered cheerily when Haknyeon called out to them. 

Haknyeon sat with Sowmi and Piggly and started to serve out the platters of steaming food from the table. The children took timid bites and glanced uncertainly up at Haknyeon. It wasn't until he started to eat the food himself that Haknyeon realised what was wrong. There was something oddly familiar about the texture he had never before chewed through. 

Haknyeon spat out the food and forced the children to do the same. They looked relieved, if a little confused, about why they had to. Haknyeon couldn't tell them it was Hyunmin. He hardly wanted to know the fact himself and Mina and her friends weren't around to explain how something like this could happen. 

Falling back into familiarity and wanting to pluck out his own tongue, Haknyeon woke up in his bunk on the witches’ ship. It was near silent save for the periodic beeping of the equipment monitoring the ship and the air moving through the ventilation shafts to be recycled. 

He expected the knocking from his dream even though he knew how impossible it was. He listened harder and harder until he was leaning all the way out of his bunk and saw Yeorum curled up on the floor beside him. Haknyeon kept listening for the knocking as he watched her breathe slowly and the almost lupine twitch of her face as she slept. 

Haknyeon was surrounded by the force because of these witches. It only made sense that he would feel some of it even if it was in ways he wished not to. He tried to match the rhythm of his breathe to Yeorum’s. He hadn't eaten Hyunmin. Everything was fine. Hyunmin was fine. Hyunmin wasn't on Cogalle or anywhere like that. Hyunmin was headed home and that was where Haknyeon needed to go too. 


	13. Hyunmin at the Imperial Academy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hyunmin heads to Lothal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol i am changing the schedule a bit otherwise i will be forever uploading on the same weekends that i am at work

Doreen was a place that had muddled Hyunmin’s brain more and more since he'd arrived on the planet. When the artificial city got too much for him, bright lights never dimming regardless of the time and the grimey depths of the myriad alleyways between turreted buildings, he'd head to the very top deck. Up on the top the air was full of grit and stung Hyunmin’s eyes. But at least that felt real. 

Doreen’s sun was weak and distant so the sky above was grey with chill. But this was the closest he had felt to home in a long while. It was a guilty thought seeing as he was without KT-GZ. He had left the droid in what he hoped to be the careful hands of Xiyeon and Rena but more than not trusting them he needed to be alone. Sitting alone in the shade of starships was the biggest comfort to Hyunmin and he hated to even admit that much to himself. 

As well as craving his home physically he was supposed to ceaselessly long for the other half of his heart. But he wasn’t. The abrasion of the air was enough to weather Hyunmin into something far more patient than the human he was. 

Initially Hyunmin assumed that spending his days thinking about escaping to the top deck had settled him. Staring at all of everything, the finite infinity of the ocean curving beyond the horizon, had stilled Hyunmin’s heart and he knew this wasn't simply a state of calm. He was aware that he might never see the same things as Haknyeon again. He had a way back to Lothal but he didn't have a way back to Corellia to find Haknyeon and return him home. He was stuck and he wasn't sure whether a solution existed to him in all the edges of the galaxy. 

A firm nudge jolted Hyunmin from his thoughts. 

Quickly Hyunmin twisted around and clambered to his knees. His motions were rough and clumsy and he knew he should rightfully have felt ashamed of how his senses had dulled. He counted himself lucky that it was Roa who had found him, presumably not to shove him to his death.

“Is everything alright” Hyunmin asked. He remained on his knees, uncertain of whatever Roa wanted from him. He couldn’t think of any real reason she’d need to find him. He wasn’t set to fly anywhere and he hoped she didn’t want him to go off to deceive some sketchy smugglers that would do more than let him walk away successful. 

“Of course it is.” Roa still carried herself with grace even without the exaggerated shell crafted from swathes of oceanic fabrics. But she looked tired and Hyunmin wondered whether that was a revelation of natural light. She sat down beside him and her shoulders sagged. Hyunmin wasn't sure what he was allowed or expected to do in this situation. Though he liked Roa he was still a bit afraid of her. No amount of reflection on top of this world would change that. 

“Did you just need to come here to think?” Hyunmin hazarded. He already knew he'd struggle to comfort her but his brain was spitting sparks of incomprehension and he needed some way to rationalise things. 

“Something like that,” Roa said. She smiled grimly at Hyunmin before turning her face to the wind. The air up here was thin enough to whip quickly and it might have felt even brisker above the stirring of the sea. 

Roa hadn't spoken much to Hyunmin. He assumed it was because she was busy and didn't much like him and his questions but Hyunmin could be understanding of the pressures she faced. In truth it was far beyond Hyunmin’s capabilities but Yehana had done her best to explain that Roa’s situation was a difficult one. She was never meant to be the leader. Seeing her now as she had taken the role he agreed with the rest of the group who had rejected every worry and attempt to pass the responsibility. But this truly might not have been anything close to what she wanted. 

Whether she was here to think or not it was strange that she would choose to do so beside Hyunmin. 

“You didn't fall out with anyone, did you?”

“No. Why would you think that?” Roa looked bemused but Hyunmin couldn't see much that was confusing about the situation. Their views didn't align enough that Roa wouks sensibly seek him out more often than absolutely necessary. 

“I wouldn't say we're on the best of terms,” Hyunmin tried diplomatically. Roa scoffed and Hyunmin already knew he needn't ask for clarification on that. 

“We don't have to be the best of friends for me to wonder how things are. Or to just want to talk to you.”

This again was an area where they didn't agree. Hyunmin tended to avoid conversations with people that would lead to conflict. That was why he was pretending to be glad that KT-GZ had forged such a close friendship with Eunwoo and Yehana. That was why he had run from the friends who had been closer than family. It was how he had ended up here at all. 

All the same, Hyunmin was curious. Roa was trying too hard to smile. 

“What did you want to talk about?” He asked. 

“I hope you don't think poorly of me,” Roa said. This was only getting more confusing. Hyunmin really hadn't taken Roa to be the sort of person who'd be concerned with a great many opinions about her. Perhaps the opinions of her peers mattered but certainly not the opinions from those of Hyunmin’s ilk. 

“You're doing your best,” Hyunmin said just in case Roa thought she was doing him a favour by speaking like this. 

“Not really. I know that Kahi would be disappointed in me. She was the one who founded our collective. She took in a bunch of kids with nothing and no one - even the ones who were in that position because they'd thrown everything away - and taught them how to survive. She was good to us all. You would have absolutely hated her though.”

“I was expecting you to say something very different,” Hyunmin admitted. Roa laughed like this was what she had wanted all along. 

“She was very strict,” Roa explained. “She cared a lot about all of us but she never intended to be our friend. She’d have sooner seen one of us die by our own stupidity than have us all brought down by the same thing. She would have hated the fact that our operations were being undercut and sabotaged by a group of savages like your friends. She wouldn’t have taken it the same way I did. I could see it in the eyes of some of the girls. They miss Kahi’s honour. Or her bloodlust. Either way they know someone with a harder heart should have become the leader.”

“Was there an alternative?” Hyunmin asked. It certainly sounded that way from what Roa was saying but he couldn’t quite work it out. “Did they want Xiyeon to be the leader?”

“She's just a kid,” Roa laughed. But the humour dissolved quickly from her face, settled on the surface if her tongue, and Hyunmin watched her swallow back the bitterness. “But there was someone else a while ago. But she disappeared. She vanished without a word to anyone. I imagine it is very similar to what you did except she took someone with her.”

Hyunmin had expected to feel awkward from this conversation but even being prepared didn't settle him at all. The sky looked bleaker and offered nothing in the way of assistance nor comfort. 

“Why do you say that?”

“Please don't think poorly of Yehana. I had to make her tell me. What other use is all this power that I don't want aside from getting to know everything I ask?” Roa almost began to smile but rather than a consensus between them or the mention of power it seemed more for Yehana’s sake. Hyunmin wouldn't think anything negative about her. He could understand why she would tell Roa. It isn't as though he had sworn her to secrecy but he wished he had seeing as he had been so candid with her. 

“Did she betray you? The one who left? Oh. Both of them, I suppose I am asking about.”

Roa shrugged. It was strange to see anything less than elegance from Roa but it was strange enough that she'd deemed it important enough to seek out Hyunmin at all. He was glad that she had because it was nice to consider that he wasn't hated in as direct a way as he had first assumed. But it made Hyunmin reconsider his thoughts of abandoning these smugglers. 

He knew they'd be fine to go on without him on this particular mission, especially if he was more often a gambling chip than a player, but he wondered if he might regret leaving them so suddenly. It was a strange thought when they had kidnapped him and hinted that they could ditch him at any time. But Hyunmin still wondered. 

“She must not have but even now it still feels like she did. Like she tore away pieces of all of us when she removed herself from us. It wasn’t just that she took vessels from where they were hidden away on Nubia and Sembla, either. She was someone we loved. We still haven’t recovered from her absence. I doubt your friends recovered from you leaving. In this life all we have are the people we trust.”

“You’re not telling me I should go back to them, are you?”

Roa shook her head. She raised a hand and held it between them. The moment of hesitation dropped and her hand fell into Hyunmin’s shoulder. “I wouldn't. I just hope that even though she left independently of Kahi and her people, I wouldn't want her to come back.” Roa considered the words and how they tasted in the well of her tongue. She dispelled whatever realisation she came to quickly. “If it hurt us this much to have her leave I can't help but wonder how much it hurt her to stay as long as she did. She wouldn't make a decision like that lightly. Losing her like this is better than watching her lose herself.”

Hyunmin wasn’t sure whether what he was hearing was anything like kindness. The smuggler who left Roa had left enough of a mark that she wouldn't soon be forgotten but there wasn't much in the way of ugly disdain in Roa’s voice. She didn't truly ache from her words and Hyunmin could only surmise that she had come to terms with things much longer ago. She hadn't stumbled upon this perspective simply because she has heard from Yehana how Hyunmin had longed to leave his life. 

Whether it was for herself or indeed for Hyunmin it seemed a lot like forgiveness was bestowed upon him. 

 

Hyunmin wasn’t exactly sure why the teams had changed so drastically but he wished KT-GZ would stop complaining about Yehana’s absence. They were even on another ship under Roa’s command but Eunwoo was right there and wouldn’t have felt so happy about having the astromech at her side if she knew how much it was protesting. 

Neither at the base nor on Doreen had Hyunmin spent much time with Sungyeon and Rena. He felt as uncertain about this as he had when Roa came to speak with him alone. 

With Yuha and Sungyeon on board there was no need for Hyunmin to pilot and the pressure of leaving the Doreen atmosphere was much heavier out of the cockpit. He held his head in his hands and waited for the feeling to abate while he ignored how he could hear his droid bleeping obnoxiously from beside the pilots. The nausea remained and flared with the weight of a hand on his shoulder.

“You should go back and sleep,” Rena suggested. 

Hyunmin tried to smile but he struggled. He hadn’t flown this often in years and the constant upheaval was something his body couldn’t get the hang of. He was further from the fulcrum here and he couldn’t handle the difference in G-force. He doubted it would be any better further back. 

“I’m fine, thank you,” Hyunmin said. “It has been a while since I flew so often. I can’t wait to get home and stay still for a while.”

“Don’t you like flying?” Rena asked. She looked genuinely as though she couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to fly near-constantly.Hyunmin supposed there was a time in his life when he was the same.

“I have had all the adventures I can stomach,” Hyunmin said. 

“But there is so much more out there,” Rena said. There was the sort of sparkle in her eyes that Hyunmin hadn’t seen for awhile from a person speaking about travelling through space. It was the way he’d seen scores of species look before but he had seen the merits of keeping his feet firmly on a place it was possible to call home. 

He was returning to his home so soon. Being a passenger on this starship felt like a sign that he’d be able to run just like before without being impeded by responsibility. And then he’d be somewhere that he wouldn’t want to fly away from ever again. 

“I could live my life a million times more and there isn’t anything that I’d want to do more than stay in one place.”

Rena sighed and looked at Eunwoo as though she wanted some help to convince him otherwise. 

“I have too many friends in different places to want to stay in one place,” Eunwoo said as she leaned back further in her seat. Her eyes were heavy and Hyunmin wondered whether this might simply be conversational ennui. 

“It helps that the rest of us are with you all the time too,” Rena laughed. 

“Yeah, I guess that’s a nice part of it too.”

“Shut up, you totally miss me when I’m not around!” Rena said. There was triumph in her voice and it was nice to be so certain like that. There were things that were universal and this sort of certainty between the closest of people. Even if Eunwoo pretended to sleep just so she could deny ever missing Rena she couldn’t strip away the happiness from knowing the truth untold. 

“Surely that spirit is in you still,” Rena said as she turned from jabbing Eunwoo’s ribs to fix Hyunmin with her question. “You can’t lose it that easily. You want an adventure. I can see it!”

“I don’t want an adventure,” Hyunmin said. “What makes you so sure that I would still want adventure?”

“Easy!” Rena chirped. “Standing in one place is so boring. You know that. You chose to fly away from home for the first time. You didn’t choose to stay in one place forever.”

Hyunmin frowned. His head still felt foggy from the launch of the starship and he supposed that must have been what made Rena’s words almost make sense. He hadn’t chosen to stay in one place forever. He had fallen right out of the sky and been stranded without a way home and even if the change in Hyunmin’s mind had been quick it had still taken time. He hadn’t boarded the starfighter and gone off course on purpose. 

He hadn’t chosen it at the time, so a desire to adventure could still be there, but he was choosing now. 

“I think I am going to stay in one place for a very long time after all this.”

“For the rest of your life?” Eunwoo asked with her eyes still closed. An excellent impression of sleep. 

“I hope so,” Hyunmin replied. 

“That really sounds awful!” Rena groaned. She flopped back in her seat and swatted Eunwoo’s shoulder. 

“How so? What is it that makes you want to keep travelling? Is it having all your friends with you like Eunwoo?”

Eunwoo’s eyes snapped open and she glared at Hyunmin. “Why did you say it like that? What’s your problem with what I said?”

“There are a lot of bad people about. They go to planets in every sector of the galaxy and steal children. Well, they recruit them officially. They put posters and notices around and tell the citizens of the countries on each planet how they can help their children behave well and excel in their lives. We’d all have the chance to move on to bigger and better things. I don’t know if it could ever be called better but they trained the compassion right out of us. All for a way to travel the galaxy and get a pension if we lived long enough to claim it.”

It was not the story Hyunmin was expecting. 

“Were you going to become a stormtrooper?”

Rena shrugged. “It is difficult to say. They would just kill the ones that they didn’t think would make it. There were a lot of training accidents. I even had to have some of those accidents.”

Rena’s tone was matter of fact but her words required something far deeper than they had. Even Eunwoo’s eyes cracked open and she looked to be watching Hyunmin warily as though his reaction to the words would be extreme. But he'd had to do similar things that he never got to call accidents. 

“Did you run away too?”

Rena looked closely at Hyunmin’s face before her own split into a grin. “No. Not even sensing that I would be the casualty of an accident made me want to run. I considered fighting my way out of it and taking every one of them down with me. It would serve them right for training me so well yet not quite well enough.”

“You were fine that people died at your hands? Your friends?”

“They weren't my friends,” Rena said quietly. “As colleagues they were all enemies. We competed every step of the way through the academy. Whether they lived or died was inconsequential. Besting them was all I lived for. Eunwoo is my friend. Kyla is my friend. Roa and everyone who follows her and agreed to steal me away from that place is my friend.”

“Then you didn't choose either,” Hyunmin pointed out. 

“She is definitely choosing,” Eunwoo said as she sat up straighter. “She could probably do away with every single one of us before we had the chance to defend ourselves.”

“I'm mostly joking when I say that, silly,” Rena grinned. 

Whether Rena was joking or not it didn’t sound as though she had chosen any part of this. But she enjoyed it. The same had happened to Hyunmin. He was far better off in the place he had ended up but had he been the one to take initiative he wouldn’t have ended up in the perfect place. 

 

Lothal was exactly as he remembered it. Aside from the fact that Haknyeon wasn’t here with him. He was on the other side of the planet and he wouldn’t have seen a place like this whilst living here ordinarily but just standing here had the right sort of pull. The same weightlessness existed where he might just leap into the air and never touch the ground again. 

It wasn't the return that he wanted and it wasn't even similar to the first time he arrived. There wasn't a shred of peace for Hyunmin finally being where he had hoped he wanted to be. The reason was obvious enough yet Hyunmin was still disappointed. 

“What's wrong with you?” Sungyeon asked as she handed a chest plate to Hyunmin. The white plastoid felt cool in his hands and he wondered whether Eunwoo’s gambling with Sally and Soyee was smart enough to get almost identical protection. Not that Hyunmin planned on getting shot. 

“Just ignore him,” Rena said as she skipped through the door to slap Sungyeon’s shoulder. She was already wearing the black body glove and Hyunmin wondered whether it was right to worry at the ease with which she wore it. “He's probably just tired from all the moving around we're doing.”

“I wish you'd get tired from it,” Sungyeon says without any heat. 

“You don't mean that!”

With Rena flopping over Sungyeon’s back the instant she bent to search through the boxes at the back of the ship it looked very much as though she meant what she said. 

“Get off me, you oaf! Eunwoo had better not lie and say she checked any of this stuff. I doubt we have four uniforms between these boxes.”

“Don't be mad,” Rena said cheerfully. “She must have been scammed back on Doreen.”

“I am well aware that Eunwoo did most of the scamming,” Sungyeon said as she weaved away from the hands clamouring to squeeze her cheeks. As if on cue KT-GZ arrived bleeping indignantly in Eunwoo’s defence. 

“You can’t lie to me,” Sungyeon muttered darkly. KT-GZ bleeped some more and Sungyeon raised another of the plastoid plates as though it would deter the droid from being just as cheeky again. 

KT-GZ came calling to Hyunmin for help but he wasn’t inclined to defend Eunwoo either, especially after seeing her deceit with his own eyes. He accepted the plastoid plate from Sungyeon and wondered how he was supposed to put this one on. Sungyeon continued piling parts of armour in Hyunmin’s arms but Rena helpfully snatched things off him and flung them back into another box. Eventually it seemed they were done. 

“Come on,” Rena said, “I’ll show you how to put it all on.”

“It’s not rocket science,” Sungyeon called after them, “He’ll be able to work it out.”

Hyunmin probably would not have been able to work out how to put on the uniform without Rena’s help. 

“None of these pieces fit together,” Hyunmin mumbled as he tries to work out the order. Rena was clearly getting frustrated with him as he failed to work out how to put on the stormtrooper uniform though he could have guessed as much from her countenance and not the commentary. 

“Look at you. It’s already hard to believe that you made it as a stormtrooper. You’re supposed to be one of the most elite fighters in the galaxy? Yet you can’t even dress yourself?”

“Is it my fault that these uniforms are impossible?” Hyunmin asked before jamming the helmet onto his head. He caught his own reflection and unfortunately didn’t look the part. Rena was right about that. But Hyunmin hadn't been doing nothing but flying and shooting from the comfort of his cockpit. He’d probably rank somewhere near enough to be convincing. 

He’d do whatever he could to get wherever he needed to be. 

 

The helmet was fitted with ventilation yet the air was still too close. Hyunmin tried not to breathe too heavily but his chest was screaming for more air. This wasn't even a perilous situation, not really. He was only standing in the grounds of the Imperial Training Academy but this was enough. His feet were firmly on the planet he had settled in his heart for so long yet there was something missing. There was a weight he was hoping to feel press down against his sternum but no matter how shallow his breaths the stone was absent. It had been gone for too long now.

There was something else missing of course but Hyunmin was trying not to dwell too much on that, the more pressing of two issues. He was trying to be happy with thoughts that he was going to find the person who belonged at home with him and somehow everything would work out without extended consideration.

But whether Hyunmin thought about it or not his breaths clouded his vision even without clouding the visor of the helmet.

The temperature of the air was mild and the pressure indicated fair weather was on the way. The helmet showed the degrees in difference between himself and Rena and Eunwoo as they stood in the academy courtyard. Everything was precisely measured and analysed and shown to Hyunmin in every detail he never thought he needed to know. These uniforms weren't even genuine products. Hyunmin was wary of the possibility that there was so much more data available to the elite fighters and marksmen who stood all around.

Rena offered her identification number when prompted by the stormtrooper who received them. "RN-1829," she said boldly. Hyunmin didn't doubt there was a database that could instantly be called upon to verify identities of troopers in an instant and he couldn't imagine Rena would be oblivious to this.

"GR-2225," came the reply from the stormtrooper whose eyes were level with Hyunmin's. They looked down at Rena patiently and Hyunmin wondered what the helmet was telling its wearer about the apparent deserter. "Your Nubia offices called ahead with notice of this shipment."   
"That is correct," Rena said. She projected a small inventory list above her wrist and transmitted it to GR-2225. There were a quiet few moments when the lost of items was being checked over and Hyunmin held his breath as he waited for the decision to be made.

Hyunmin looked over at Eunwoo. But like this it was strange. He only knew her to be Eunwoo because they were standing side by side. Like this there was no other way to dissolve anonymity. Hyunmin didn't have the training or the procedures to live without truly understanding the feelings and expressions of the species who were meant to be on his side. Rena was so plain about the details of her time training like this and Hyunmin only at this moment realised how easily she must have been able to mask things both from herself and others in the past. It wasn't something Hyunmin felt entirely comfortable with.

Like this he could do anything or say anything and to the uninitiated his actions would be those of the identical mass of war and brutality. In these uniforms there were no commendations for exceptional behaviour or skill but there was also no culpability. Even as rebels there were only the symbols and badges which branded everything and hid away the acts of any in the alliance who took matters into their own hands. On a scale like this is was easier to hide away from consequences by conflating all thought and understanding into binary morality.

There was more to life than this.

Fear.

Hyunmin could admit that without wanting to exist in the bounds of the conflict he was wracked with fear whilst deep inside the territory once more. He feared being discovered and torn away from any hope of the happiness he had held onto for a handful of years. He had these new tentative friendships too. He feared for Rena and Eunwoo and Yehana and each of the people who had helped him. He even feared for his old friends who had done nothing wrong in their own eyes but had done everything wrong in a welcome.

But the moment passed. There was no way to trace anything back to any number of civilians anywhere in the galaxy. GR-2225 held up a hand.

"Everything seems to be in order. Are you able to unload on your own or do you require service droids to assist you in transportation of the goods?"

"We will be fine to unload to the courtyard here but we will require assistance transporting the containers to your stores," Rena said gladly. Hyunmin wished she had accepted the offer of droids. He wasn't particularly glad about having to do more heavy lifting. He wasn't sure whether he was imagining Eunwoo snickering beside him.

"Our side will be sufficiently able to take it all inside if you just leave it here," GR-2225 replied. At least there was kindness in that.

Rena looked decidedly undisciplined as she skipped over towards the starship and slung her arm over Eunwoo's shoulders. "Are you ready to do some work?"

"Not at all," Hyunmin said.

It took a while to put the delivery into the trolleys and hover them down the ramp from the cargo hold and into the academy courtyard. The uniform he wore kept him cool to an extent but it was odd that he'd need to wear it in the first place.

"Eunwoo," Hyunmin said, feeling uncertain of most things but confident that he could freely speak inside the ship.

"Why are you using my name? It's like you want to get caught."

"Obviously I don't."

Eunwoo put her hands on her hips and Hyunmin supposed that was the easiest way for her to express her incredulity. It was a strange conclusion to come to.

"If we get caught what are the chances that I would ever be able to go back home and live the way I want to? Without any of this."

"Maybe Rena was right," Eunwoo shrugged. "Maybe you missed the excitement and adventure of flying around and deceiving the First Order and everyone under them. This is your planet, of course, and being here clearly isn't enough for you. You need something to make your time more lively."

"I am sick of liveliness. I want to be boring and do nothing."

Eunwoo laughed. "Yeah. You've got your wish."

Hyunmin frowned. It was neither funny nor true but he couldn't refute that when it was what he wanted from the entire universe. But there was a reason he wanted to ask Eunwoo specifically. "We're here on a false trade at this academy but they wouldn't get an elite military squadron to act as couriers. So why do we need to wear these uniforms? Why do uniformed troopers need to be the ones to accept the delivery?"

"We already had what we needed to pass off the goods. But Yehana carves such delicate details into every story," Eunwoo said as she stood up from pretending to see to some of the boxes. "There are chances that you should take whenever you see them. You know. Instead of asking questions."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Hyunmin asked.

Eunwoo hopped over one of the crates and knocked her knuckles against Hyunmin's helmet. "I said to stop asking questions."

It was all well and good saying things but it was another thing having to try to understand what it all meant. He wanted to believe every one of the intentions held by the friends he had made more recently were good. But this looked much closer to blind selflessness. It wouldn't do anyone any good to indulge in things like that. Hyunmin wouldn't have considered anything like that when he was officially a rebel. Back then all he had wanted was to escape the places he was being edged into by his fear of dying and his fear of not dying by the same hand.

Unloading the crates from the ship took far longer than Hyunmin had hoped. He could admit that he was preoccupied and made a great many mistakes that hindered the operation but that only made things worse. But Eunwoo and Rena weren't at all annoyed by him. In fact he was almost certain that Rena was extending the time taken on purpose. But finally the cargo hold of the ship was empty.

"Well. Those are all of the goods," Rena said conversationally. GR-2225 had been watching the entire time and made an odd gesture with their hand.

"Thank you for your work. The credits will be transferred to your organisation shortly."

"Excellent," Rena said. "I suppose we should be on our way."

"You should," GR-2225 said. They gestured to a small building in the courtyard and added, "Do not forget to sign out with the reception and await your search."

"Were we searched on the way in?" Hyunmin asked quietly. Rather he had attempted to ask quietly but such a thing was impossible through the helmets.

"This is where the best fighters in the Lothal system are trained," GR-2225 said in a clipped voice. "Any security risk would be neutralised with ease regardless of whether or not we were initially made aware of them through a search."

"That's you told," Rena said cheerily.

That really was Hyunmin told but he didn't have to be happy about it as he followed the instructions. Even Sungyeon and Yuha were called off the starship to be searched too. They weren't uniformed though.

"It's normal to feel self-conscious, isn't it," Yuha asked in a whisper. "Why don't we have uniforms too so we can blend in?"

"I don't know," Sungyeon said boredly as they crossed the courtyard. "Ask Eunwoo."

"It had nothing to do with me!"  Eunwoo shot back. "I can't help what stock I get. I just place a bet and do whatever I can to win the things that we need. Is it my fault if the things we get are faulty or incomplete?"

"Obviously it is," Sungyeon retorted. "Do your job and check things next time. That could just have easily have been ship parts that were faulty or missing. You could have killed us all."

"What is happening?" Eunwoo asked. She elbowed Hyunmin and asked, "Do you know what's happening? Why I would be slandered so awfully like this?"

"Not a clue,"

"I am telling you to be more responsible for once in your life," Sungyeon said.

Hyunmin wished they’d stop bickering quite so loudly whilst in the midst of the stormtrooper academy. GR-2225 already pointed out the danger faced by intruders and assailants and Hyunmin didn’t doubt that even something like this would count as something they would be prepared for. 

Signing in had been a brief procedure but signing out took much longer. The stormtroopers all around were shorter than Hyunmin would have guessed and he hadn’t even imagined that there were too many shorter than Rena herself. It wasn’t something Hyunmin was going to say aloud until they had all left and he was less at risk of being shot or worse. 

“Oh no,” Yuha said once a team of troopers had boarded their starship to commence the vessel search. 

“What is it?” Sungyeon asked quietly. 

“I forgot Hyunmin’s blaster.”

“My blaster?” Hyunmin asked. He wasn’t as quiet as either Yuha or Sungyeon and there was something pointed about the way the uniformed troopers around the administration table ignored his ineffective whisper. The one trooper who had removed their helmet wasn’t quite so determined to affect ignorance. Delicate features were organised into a warning glare and the trooper raised a finger to their lips. Hyunmin wasn’t sure for whose benefit he was supposed to quieten down. He left the talking to Yuha and Sungyeon whose words weren’t distorted and amplified beyond discretion. 

“You had a blaster when we found you. It was stolen of course but you could probably use it at a time like this.”

“A time like what?”

“Please shut up,” Eunwoo hissed through the rattle of her helmet filter. 

Hyunmin was still partially wondering what Yuha meant about finding him when Yehana had already admitted that Eunwoo was responsible for knocking him out and dragging him away from the base he’d been escaping from. He assumed all along that the blaster had been left behind but the blaster being on the starship was something he should have been able to discover for himself. 

“What about KT-GZ,” Hyunmin asked. The droid hadn’t alerted him to anything familiar but now that he thought of how much he relied on the droid he realised it wasn’t with them now. 

“Sorry, Hyunmin,” Sungyeon said slowly. She genuinely sounded apologetic but it shouldn’t have been something so serious. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing your friend for a long while.”

“Why? Are they going to confiscate my droid?”

“Nothing like that. We’re going to look after KT,” Sungyeon explained. She rested her hand on Hyunmin’s shoulder and smiled kindly at him. “You’re smart though. You were a fighter before but you’ll just have to do it alone from now on. Who knows, maybe we’ll meet again and we can return your astromech.”

Hyunmin knew it wasn’t at all strange to have his suspicions picked by Sungyeon’s words. She was saying the strangest of things and he knew a farewell when he heard one. There was a reason he had avoided so many in his life.

“Are you stealing KT from me?”

“You wouldn’t both be able to get out of here easily. You either leave KT behind or you get stuck with us for a while longer.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He could hardly look for confirmation from the blank helmets of his peers and he only had Sungyeon’s steady kindness and Yuha’s timid guilt.

“You are going somewhere. You have to leave soon.”

Hyunmin wanted to ask for more information but he already knew that he wasn’t going to get a response other than being shushed for his troubles. Not that he had the time to ask before Rena shoved him out of the way. 

The plastoid guards covering Hyunmin’s knees absorbed the shock from the hard floor as he tried to roll up from the shove but he wasn’t sure how well the uniforms would protect against real bolts of energy from a genuine E-11 blaster. Eunwoo and Rena had their blasters levelled against the stormtroopers standing in the reception hall of the academy. 

“What are you doing?” Hyunmin asked. Eunwoo pressed her boot down on his fingers and even with the protection he understood what the suggestion of pain was. He shut up, just as she wanted, and hoped this wasn't the moment they were all obliterated by the overwhelming force expended to neutralise an attack like this. 

“What is the meaning of this?” Asked the stormtrooper without a helmet. Their eyes were steadily clear and even if they had successfully intoned surprise in their speech it was easy to see how even this question was part of an act. 

It didn't make any sense. Hyunmin had never heard any mention of extended contact with individual stormtroopers to stage a scene of any scale. This seemed like the most dangerous place even if it was all a play. He had no idea why anything like this would be set up when at best it would destroy all future prospects of trade with the First Order and at worst would get every one of them killed. 

Eunwoo lifted her foot from Hyunmin’s hand and nudged Yuha forwards. Yuha almost looked as though she was a hostage in the situation but she steadied the fluster of her face within an instant. “You will open the gates of the compound and will allow one of our party to escape unpursued.”

The stormtrooper without a helmet might as well have been wearing one for all the emotion passing over their delicate face. But there was a nod. “Is that all that you wish?”

“Yes. That's right,” Yuha replied. 

“And what becomes of the rest of you?”

“Whatever you need in order to fulfil our demand and let Hyunmin go.”

The chill from hearing those words was enough to render Hyunmin motionless. All he could do was watch the unconcerned glare on her face. They were vastly outnumbered but even so it was not as though they had threatened to fight their way out. The actual term in place was much worse. Yet it was what the actual stormtroopers agreed to. 

“The freedom of one costs a lot these days.”

“No it doesn’t,” Hyunmin said quickly. No sooner than the words had left his mouth did he realise just how incorrect he must have been. 

The first time he had escaped from anywhere he had assumed the price of his freedom to be negligible. He took a small starship and flew as far as he could. But he hadn't been the only one on that mission. Wontak had to hear Hyunmin’s confession of how difficult he found things and then Wontak had to go on wondering what could have happened to the friend who deviated from the course set out in their mission. Hyunmin never asked afterwards but there were no guarantees that the mission went smoothly without one of the pilots employed to carry it out. 

There were all sorts of losses that Hyunmin could never have imagined which got him to his new life on Lothal. It could have cost far more than he would have predicted. 

Right now there was a potential price with the weight Hyunmin couldn't reasonably excuse. The people who had been so kind to him were people he didn't want paying for his messes, nor did he want them going to drastic lengths in order to save him. Not that anyone paid him any mind. 

The stormtrooper with an exposed face stood from the table. The white plastiod plates of their uniform gleamed purest white and Hyunmin wondered whether this was a warning for him seeing as his own uniform was enameled much less cleanly. It was a warning he wished he had been more keen to heed when he once again found himself on the barrel end of a blaster. He knelt up straighter and hoped he wouldn't die as dumbly and helplessly as a wild creature untouched by the influence of the sentient races. 

“You can't kill him,” Yuha said. Her voice trembled and not even having the power of bargaining as these smugglers must have wielded so often was cause enough for fear. Hyunmin wondered what that felt like. He never had any leverage in any situation he had encountered aside from the moment he landed on Lothal and found the kindness of others to be a valuable asset. It might not be such a useful asset currently. 

“We could do whatever we want to,” the spokesperson of the stormtroopers said. They levelled the blaster directly at Hyunmin. The stormtrooper was correct. They really could do whatever they wanted. He didn’t particularly want any of the people he came with to get into trouble for the sake of saving him.

“Just do whatever,” Hyunmin said quickly. He knelt up and spread his hands before him. “Well, no. Just let the others go and don’t hurt any of them.”

“Since when was this a negotiation?” The stormtrooper asked. Hyunmin should have expected to hear something like that and he wouldn’t dare refute the fluidity of options on the other side of the fray. On this side, kneeling like the slave or victim he was bound to be, Hyunmin hated the rigidity of the situation but he didn’t want to be forced into a certain fate. But everything until now has proven to Hyunmin that not wanting something to happen won’t prevent it. 

“Now is a good enough time to start,” Sungyeon said. 

Hyunmin glanced over his shoulder just to see what Sungyeon could be talking about. And it was her hurling a helmet across the room into the midst of the stormtroopers. He couldn’t guess what she meant to achieve by that until smoke fizzed out of the helmet. 

“Hyunmin, get out of here!” 

He maybe hesitated for a moment too long but Rena must have been the one to lend her helmet to the cause. Her eyes met Hyunmin’s before the shroud of smoke fell over the reception and he hated the cut of her gaze right into him. He wasn't to learn was to become of those he left behind, nor was he to worry about the details. Yet this was harder to settle within himself than the choice he had made years before. 

Rena’s eyes implored and even knowing what she intended Hyunmin wasn't sure he could satisfy his part of the deal. Eunwoo and Yuha hefting him up and shoving him towards the exit were difficult to disagree with. 

“Even without KT you'll find your way out,” Sungyeon yelled. “Good luck!”

That wasn't what Hyunmin was concerned about in the slightest but he had to wonder whether his astromech would forgive him from now until he found the person he knew to be home. He ran, weightless in the counterfeit uniform, and tried not to get too distracted laughing at an errant, “May the force be with you.”


	14. Haknyeon Adrift

Haknyeon was well aware that he had outworn his welcome with the witches. He liked to listen to their stories and hear more about how they came together as a group but it wasn't exactly beneficial to the rest of them to float around the mid-rim of the galaxy pointlessly. Getting back home was a much more difficult task than assumed. 

“It’s difficult,” Seola said. She sounded apologetic, which was nice enough, but there were things Haknyeon needed more than pity. “We can only do what we're allowed. We only have enough fuel units to return home or to take you to yours.”

It was all very well and good saying that but the problem with there being thirteen of the witches was that they all said a lot of different things as though it hadn't mattered that they claimed destiny compelled them to help, or that their home was with each other, or that Haknyeon was as special as they were. 

“You're going back?” Haknyeon asked. He didn't want to bother with hope that wasn't even there. 

“Lothal is a dangerous place so we can't risk getting stuck there.”

It is precisely the place Haknyeon wished he was stuck so he didn't have to go through heartbreak just like this. It sounded like a flimsy excuse from Seola, especially as there hadn't been anything dangerous at all about how happy he had been with his family and Hyunmin and all their gorgeous pigs. Even the political struggles of the galaxy were diluted to an insignificant tint to the freshness of the air. It was so far from everything even remotely dangerous and Haknyeon sometimes found it difficult to believe the patrolling troopers of today were the oppressive blizzard of times gone by that he had heard about. Lothal was safe. 

Lothal was home. 

Lothal was where Haknyeon needed to be. 

Boarding the starship once more felt like much more of a chore this time. He wouldn't be going much further with these friends he'd been lucky enough to encounter and he couldn't say he was ready for a farewell. They were people who had cared for him and people who had offered up more to him than he could hope to repay. They were people he had yearned to learn more about and they were people he had loved. 

There was an apology in Dayoung’s face as the first to greet Haknyeon for the final time. It would have made sense for the witches to have discussed this beforehand but good reasoning didn't settle Haknyeon any more for being the last to learn of this. 

He wondered whether the walk to the ship from the market that Seola had shown him around had been long enough to let his tears dry up completely. He felt like crying when Dayoung pulled him into a hug but it was kindness, it was comfort, it was the last he’d feel of the thing he’d grown most accustomed to. 

But Dayoung didn’t seem to mind at all about his waxing grief. 

“We were visited,” Dayoung hissed into Haknyeon’s ear. “We wouldn’t leave you otherwise.”

Haknyeon had no clue what that meant but he held on tighter to a memory from an eternity before. 

It was a year before the sky exploded, or perhaps it was two, that a friend Haknyeon hardly remembered was vanished from his mind. Another friend who was still around to remember, but still destined to leave and be forgotten, held onto Haknyeon’s hand. The desperation was contagious and Hanyeon wasn’t sure whether it originated from himself or his friend. Wherever it began it fogged the space all around them aside from the dense brightness directly ahead of them. 

It wasn’t easy to remember and Haknyeon wondered whether this was a real memory and whether it was right to try to supplement the memory whilst being held by Dayoung. It seemed like the sort of visit that Dayoung would have been talking about. There was nothing pleasant in the memory and this hug felt like fear. 

“You have to go,” Haknyeon whispered. “I get it. You have to.”

He couldn’t allow Dayoung to withstand a feeling like this when she had done what it took to escape fear once. Or even if she had been taken from the situation by divine choice it wasn’t something Haknyeon could attempt to erase by begging her to stay, to take him with them wherever they need to go. 

“Maybe we did know each other,” Dayoung said as she withdrew from him. “Maybe we’ll know each other again.”

Haknyeon didn’t doubt there was a chance for anything like that to happen again but he still wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of having to say any amount of farewells to the witches who had helped him and agreed a point to stop. 

“Yeonjung has been taken ill,” Dawon said as Haknyeon approached. He hadn’t even thought of the question but seeing only twelve witches around made the question to the answer bustle its way to the front of his mind. In an instant the worries of how ill Yeonjung could be cooled and Dawon drew him into an embrace that calmed him. He thought maybe he really could go on alone even without friends like these remaining at his side.  

“Do you really think I could manage to find my way on my own?” Haknyeon asked. It was a selfish question, especially after being doused in the possibility that he could, but he wanted to see the steady agreement on Dawon’s face as assurance. Had her face deviated from tranquility he might have suspected her of hesitating due to doubts. Instead the air was static and the entirety of time froze in place as it awaited her reply. 

“Even when difficultes are present the galaxy wouldn’t have you struggle for no reason.”

“Don’t many people have to struggle and suffer regardless of reason?” Haknyeon asked. He wasn’t sure where this boldness came from when his fate was sealed and he had no reason to ask questions that couldn’t change a thing. 

“Haknyeon,” Dayoung said reproachfully. Dawon waved away her intent to assist but that wasn’t enough to have Meiqi stand down. 

“Might you come with me, Haknyeon?” she asked. She held her hand out between them and Haknyeon wondered where there was to go with one of the witches when he was to leave them all anyway. But he was curious and there wasn’t anything else in the universe that he had to lose, that had been true for a while now. 

He linked their hands and was no longer contained in the witches’ ship. The air stung Haknyeon’s face and even standing at the water’s edge there wasn’t the sharpness of salt. There was something base about every inhale and Haknyeon wondered why Meiqi would want him to be in a place like this. It was not just the feel of the air but the colour of it was tinged with rusted warmth, not that Haknyeon could feel it. Instead he was soaked right through to the bone with ice from whatever Meiqi was holding in her mind. He considered releasing her hand but her grip was far too tight for that. 

“What is this place?”

“Woostri,” Meiqi said. “Each day the ocean swallowed the paths we took as we sought answers from the heavens above.”

“Heavens?”

Meiqi looked skywards. She stretched her throat as though her face would push through the clouds if she held fast enough. Eventually Haknyeon turned his face skywards too. And the smouldering sky was speckled with charred ashes. The ashes fluttered densely but even as the specks grew in size he couldn’t wince away from the impending impact of the sky falling down. 

“In all the skies is another realm,” Meiqi said. She pulled Haknyeon closer by his hand. “When we started to see beings falling from the sky, Xuanyi, Luda, and I, we asked the skies why this would happen. Nothing ever fell, nobody ever reached us, but the visions of those from beyond our world falling visited us whether we looked up or not.”

Haknyeon dropped his gaze and saw how Meiqi was watching him steadily. He’d assumed she was still watching for the fall but he supposed she had seen more than enough of it. 

“Did the skies ever tell you anything?”

Meiqi shook her head. “People kept starving and dying. We felt people we had never known starving and begging to be saved. No matter how we asked why or how we could do better all we saw were people falling from the sky.”

“Did they ever reach the ground?”

“They did to take us away from this place. They reached the ground to be found by a friend who had been praying to understand what they had seen. They reached the ground to escape the lives that had pushed them away from where they wanted to be.”

“Is it that common?” Haknyeon asked. He hadn’t heard of anyone falling from the sky before Hyunmin but watching out for all the people like that was a curious thing. 

“There isn’t always reason to anything so some things just happen,” Meiqi said. “Sometimes people do fall from the sky to get to where they need to be. You should consider that you should watch for your own fall before worrying about others.”

“What does that mean?” Haknyeon asked. He braced himself for an impact. He oddly felt as though confusion like this would be followed by a true fall of his own. Whether he was here or not, the hems around his legs getting soaked by the sea, he wouldn’t want to be pushed. Not like this. But Meiqi released his hand. 

Luda peered around Meiqi’s shoulder with reproach on her face and he wondered how much the witches had seen, whether they had seen or heard any of his confusion. They were on the starship that Haknyeon would soon have to leave and they were watching him closely. This was impact enough and Haknyeon already felt like he was falling as the seconds dwindled and he had to let the witches leave before they could be visited more tangibly. 

Haknyeon hardly had the time to say his goodbyes to the witches and Haknyeon felt even worse for the fact that he'd leave Yeonjung without even the shortest exchange. They were all people he grew to love in such a short time and even without fully understanding why they had to go he knew he couldn't hold them back any longer. 

It seemed Haknyeon had only blinked before he was back on the solid terrain of Muugrah. 

He didn't know much about the place besides what he could see (not that he was familiar with any planets further from Lothal than Garel) and he'd somehow ended up alone amongst verdant valleys. 

This felt a world away from where he thought he was. Seola had shown him around the centre of a town with a bustling market but he was alone and surrounded by lush fields creeping up hills. A lone road wound into the distance and Haknyeon wasn't even sure if he turned back his current position would make any sense. He'd disembarked The Secret with a small bag slung across his back and the understanding that the ship hadn't travelled anywhere since the last time he boarded. 

Since saying his goodbyes he supposed he might have been more of a mess than usual. He still had regrets and he still worried his time with the witches wasn't what it should have been. He could still have been locked in an illusion that any of them had wanted to show him. The landscape looked familiar in ways it shouldn't have and he chanced a turn, the opportunity to face a world of chatter and commerce. 

Haknyeon turned. The only chatter was that of the world itself, the yawning rumble of wind, and the whispers of long grasses whistling to the crops growing on the other side of each valley, creatures Haknyeon had never thought of existing truffling through the shade to graze out of sight. 

Not an illusion then, at least not one so easily cracked. 

He turned back to face the landscape that had greeted him. There wasn’t much use in standing still. He had to reach somewhere with people now. He wanted to reach a spaceport or at least another sign of civilisation. He took a step forward on the charcoal fissure between the the hopeful hills.

The colour all around was the colour of the stone against his sternum. There was something in his chest, activity beneath the crystal (kyber, possibly but surely something less powerfully precious) that assured him he was on the right path. He had to keep moving to get closer to his goal rather than remaining lost and confused. Hyunmin was somewhere. He was maybe already home but if that was the case Haknyeon only had to get there too. He had to hope he could still feel that Hyunmin was safe and at home by the time he made it to the Dominus sector. 

Haknyeon kept walking and wondered how far he'd have to go before he found a sentient soul for help. It felt like a stroke of luck that the bag Cheng Xiao had hooked over his shoulders was filled with bubbles of water. He'd never had them before but he remembered how she happily told him of her dreams whenever she slept amongst the precarious towers of stones on Carlac and the bubbles appeared. 

Having left the witches Haknyeon wondered if he really was as similar to them as they claimed. The vestiges of a dream still clung to him too desperately for him to quicken his pace and escape them. His heart was in a hurry yet the lethargy of his limbs weighed him back to the still of Muugrah and the silent road he walked. 

This was as close as he would experience to the rocky plains of Carlac. He supposed there was something more stimulating about his surroundings than the ones Cheng Xiao and Eunseo were subjected to while they tried for survival. He also hoped here was a much shorter wait for a way off this planet so that he could get to where he needed to be. 

The platinum sky glinted sharply enough that Haknyeon was reminded to try some of the water he’d been given. He pressed his lips to the bubble he cradled in his palms and sipped small amounts to quench his exhaustion. The cool was something he didn’t exactly need to refresh him seeing as he was gripped with chill with each step here took. He had been walking for a while yet he was still too cold. 

It was lonely. Haknyeon didn't want to be alone like this. 

The world grew quieter and colder as be walked further along the road. It occurred to Haknyeon that this direction might not be the one he should have taken from The Secret. But he’d been walking for long enough that half his day had passed without seeing another soul. He couldn’t imagine having to go over all that ground once more whilst laden with fatigue. Forward was the best way to go and Haknyeon hoped he’d arrive somewhere even if it wasn’t the spaceport he thought he needed to reach. There’d be someone eventually. 

The cold sky seared against Haknyeon’s eyes and he couldn’t even be sure that he was seeing the landscape as it was opposed to an imprint of the pyrite road that parted the emerald undulations of the ground. It was too much and even the water that chilled him did nothing to cool the burn in his face. He had to take a break. He sat at the roadside and waited for his eyes to soften from the solid heat. Haknyeon wanted to go home. He wanted to rest and stop having to keep going when he had no goal in sight. He didn’t know how he was to get home, only that he needed to keep trying. 

Haknyeon lay down in the grass. It occurred to him at that moment that he might die here. He had water and he had air but that wasn’t enough. This part of Muugrah was cold and he could freeze or starve or lose any sense of purpose if he was set to continue on the same path without proof that anybody else was inhabiting this part of the world. 

Eunseo and Cheng Xiao had one another and they had their dreams of the witches they were destined to meet. They had hope and Haknyeon supposed they also had language. He missed them already and not just for the thought of being able to ask them how they coped and how he was meant to go on. This world was so different to the one he’d heard of from Cheng Xiao but survival without means to go on must have been similar regardless of where it had to be.

He closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his closed eyelids. He waited for sleep or some way to lessen the load of his body but his mind was too sharp with the fear of what there was to come for him. Exposure, starvation, or being devoured by a creature he’d never have imagined in his own corner of the universe. And as sleep didn’t come he hoped for a dream instead. 

He wondered what it was truly like on Woostri when Meiqi, Luda and Xuanyi walked a concentric path that continued for as long as their lives at the edge of an ocean denser than the air yet more malleable than the ground they stood on. He wondered whether they were driven by a need to see more or a need to summon the peers that existed in their minds. Or perhaps that was the only way they knew to summon survival of their own as the sky splintered and scattered over them all. 

Slow breaths had the air freezing in Haknyeon’s lungs and he waited to feel his body form rigid crystals below the stone sitting on his chest. It wasn’t a survival he wanted or hoped for but there was nothing else that he could do when he felt himself fading. 

And finally the crackling of ice crunched its way through Haknyeon’s core. It was a strange sound that he hadn’t heard at all on his travels along the Muugrah road and even if he knew it to be the sound of his own soul he wondered why there was nothing at all organic about it. There were no creatures that existed back home that creaked and cracked so hollowly and he wondered what it would take to close his own ears to the sound. 

The sound wasn’t that of any creature that existed as far as Haknyeon knew but it was reminiscent of something back home on Lothal. The day Hyunmin crashed into the edge of the farm Haknyeon heard a sound like this. It was the crashing and crushing of the sheets of metal that encapsulated Hyunmin inside the cockpit of his X-wing. It was the sound of Haknyeon tearing apart a vessel for mechanical interest before his guilt and panic at having to free the person whose life he hadn’t even considered. He supposed he didn’t hate how the sound that began one life would signal the end of the very same existence. 

Haknyeon was shaken awake by hands warm enough to thaw through the stiffened layer of his clothes. He could breathe again and he cracked his eyes open to see the open blankness of the sky above. And then the human who leaned into view with concern writ across their face. 

“You’re not dead.”  
Haknyeon wasn’t dead but that didn’t sound like the sort of thing to say to confirm such a thing. Even if the person had an unusual way of confirming Haknyeon’s health they helped him to sit up.

“Do you not understand galactic basic?” Words Haknyeon could never identify followed that and Haknyeon couldn’t let this person get too far.

“Galactic basic, please. I’m not dead.”

“I’m Elly,” the person said from beneath the fluffy halo of their hood. The hand extended to Haknyeon seemed friendly enough that Elly might not have existed. But he reached out and let the worn warmth of Elly’s hand pull him up. 

Elly seemed nice enough. She worked on droids of all kinds with all levels of success (and failure too by the sound of it) at repairing them. She considered herself to be an apprentice though she admitted that her colleagues were all as haphazard as she was when it came to modifications. 

She talked a lot but there was an odd rhythm to her words which coupled with the way she didn't quite manage to address Haknyeon directly. Haknyeon supposed he'd be nervous too if he weren't scooped up from the roadside and resigned to death. He would likely chatter just as much about nothing and everything for the sake of filling in the silences so much that there wasn't a spare atom to use up to break bad news. Though Haknyeon wasn't sure why he'd be thinking along these lines anyway. Nobody would expect bad news after choosing to take home a waif. Unless there was regret seeping into Elly’s mind and she sensed something odd about him. 

Or she was soon to be visited too. 

The witches parted with Haknyeon for a reason and he couldn't blame them. But he could blame himself for needing their help and apparently seeking them to resolve an issue he was too helpless to work out on his own. Haknyeon turned to see behind the vehicle which hovered and juddered over the uniform slate of the road. 

He wondered whether they were being followed now (they, the witches, or even they, himself and his rescuer Elly) but he hoped he'd be forewarned of any visitors by being able to detect their pursuit. But there was nothing except for the frozen greenery behind them.

Haknyeon turned back to face the front only Elly caught his eye with apprehension plain on her face. 

“Are you alright?” She asked. She sounded as though she had already decided the answer to her question and it wasn't one that settled her. 

“I'm fine,” Haknyeon said. He hesitated to expand on that. He didn’t want to frighten her into throwing him out of her vehicle. He’d barely survived this long like this and he didn’t want to ruin this outreach of kindness. He didn’t want to lose a chance at survival. Even if there was a chance that whatever vague threat reached Dayoung could extend its hold here Haknyeon wanted to not feel so alone. 

Thinking about the potential risk he beckoned Haknyeon had to wonder who else would be affected by lending him help and kindness. 

“Are you taking me to see your friends?”

Elly let her eyes linger on Haknyeon for a moment before she smiled and turned her eyes to the empty road ahead. She said, “Yeah. They'll be able to fix you up and give you a good meal. You look like you could do with one for sure.”

Haknyeon was hungry but he didn't think it was to the extent that he'd be baring the signs of starvation after a day adrift. But he wasn’t going to turn down a meal when he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten something that tasted of warmth and home. 

“That would be nice,” Haknyeon said, “thank you.”

Elly smiled and watched the monotony of the straight road ahead that stretched further than Haknyeon could even hope to see. It was even colder with the chill of the air whooshing over his iced skin in the exposed seats of the vehicle. 

“So, Haknyeon, what brings you to Ferrum Puer? Muugrah isn't exactly a planet most travellers are desperate to visit and you don't seem prepared enough to have come here intentionally.” Elly sounded much more relaxed. Haknyeon wondered whether she'd exhausted the limits of her worries by chattering until they left her or her worries about how strange Haknyeon must be had chased off other sorts of concerns. She smiled expectantly and added, “Did you come alone?”

“Some friends found me when I was in trouble. They were helping me to find someone but something came after them to make them stop. So they had to leave me here and said I would be able to find my way home somehow.”

Haknyeon saw no harm in filling in the blanks. He trusted that the witches wouldn't have left him voluntarily, especially not with how lavishly they furnished him with their kindness. He wouldn't want to give a poor impression of the witches to anyone else who pitied him enough to help. The witches had their own difficulties without Haknyeon making it seem that they weren't so kind. 

Though it wouldn't be wise to assume that was kindness that followed him through the galaxy. 

“I lost all my credits,” Haknyeon said. “They were able to give me water to survive but maybe they hoped I'd end up finding people who could spare the space to help me get back home. Are there any large towns around where I might find people like that?”

Elly looked thoughtful as she trained her gaze on the unchanging road ahead. “I don't think you'll need to look too hard to find people who will help you. The droid repair shop where I work does work outside of the system. You can probably join the excursions to collect and find newer parts and samples.”

Haknyeon could hardly believe his ears. “You'd help me? You'd let me onto one of your ships to get home? But you don't even know where I'm going.”

Elly hesitated for a moment as though such a thought hadn't occurred to her. Then the expression passed. “We probably have operations and trade to do where you want to go. Or at least nearby. A little detour shouldn't be so bad.”

It sounded almost too good to be true but a lot of things had been for Haknyeon until now. Aside from getting lost and losing Hyunmin and being thousands of parsecs beyond anything he knew, of course. Of the big and scary unknown outside the idyllic atmosphere of Lothal, Haknyeon wasn't sure he'd encountered much of it at all. Not a single person he met was unpleasant or unkind. He really had to wonder what had formed his impression of the galaxy. 

 


	15. A Little Short to be a Stormtrooper

Hyunmin wasn’t sure whether he trusted JY-315. The stormtrooper was small, as the other stormtroopers been earlier, but there was something even less believable about this person being among the population of elite combatants in the galaxy. 

JY-315 turned nibbles into gulps as she supped from a battered bowl she convinced a restaurant worker to donate to her. It was odd. Hyunmin had mostly been surprised that she’d removed her helmet and blinked rapidly and wheedled her whims after banging loudly on the door in the grimey alley. Hyunmin held the bowl he was handed in his lap. He was reluctant to eat himself even though his stomach rumbled tightly. Food had been hard to come by in the days he’d spent since fleeing the imperial academy. It seemed foolish to trust a stormtrooper who happened to find him sleeping in the refuse area but there had been enough trust for them to both remove their helmets. 

Hyunmin ate. He had to even if it was only a small amount. It was clearly only leftovers anyway so he didn't feel like he owed anyone anything for getting him this much. There was the possibility that he shouldn't have needed it at all though. He should have been long gone from this area, spurred on by intentions of the smugglers he'd left behind. He wouldn't have needed this food at all had he been more determined to put some distance between himself and the academy that Pristin might never leave. 

When JY-315 finished her food she watched Hyunmin warily until he decided he was finished too. In a voice markedly similar to her cautious introduction upon finding Hyunmin JY-315 said, “Will you tell me your name yet?”

Hyunmin tried not to panic. Rena had told him all about the procedure he should go to when encountering those he was impersonating. She had made it sound so simple as she explained the etiquette around being one of the galaxy's best trained soldiers. 

“HY-1945,” Hyunmin said. It didn't look like the answer the stormtrooper wanted but her expression turned pleasant with the scuff of approaching footfalls. 

“Put down your blaster,” came the firm voice from the shorter of the troopers who just entered the alley. It would have been foolish of Hyunmin not to obey but it was already a mistake that he'd given in to his fright and tried to prepare himself for whatever threat arrived. 

JY-315 sighed and said, “It's just Kazoo.”

“KZ-00,” the stormtrooper corrected. They gestured to the stormtrooper beside them and said, “CH-111.”

JY-315 nudged Hyunmin and he supposed it was his turn. “HY-1945.”

There was the slightest of nods shared between KZ-00 and CH-111 before the latter said, “And what about your other name. You know, not the robot one.”

This was where Hyunmin wasn't sure how trusting he should have been of his instincts. Even through the filter of the helmets the words sounded kind to Hyunmin like they were a shared joke he should have been glad to hear. Yet Rena had told him to always be on guard with stormtroopers. Even the ones who agreed to counterfeit goods being delivered by obvious smugglers. 

There was no way the stormtroopers at the academy were fooled by the ruse and Hyunmin had no doubts that the same couldn't be said for him right now. JY-315 was pressing him for a reason and even now Hyunmin had to consider that the punchline of the joke was the fact that he had long been caught. 

Hyunmin’s hesitation must have been clear, yet another thing that was easily seen through, so he reasoned that was enough for KZ-00 and CH-111 to remove their helmets and reveal the smiles on their faces. 

Hyunmin’s hands itched around the blaster, even through the flexible plastoid gloves. He was lucky. He was closer to home than he had been in so long and even if he'd been held against his will to get this far it was through that kindness that he'd managed to survive to here. 

This much luck was unsettling. In shedding the kindness he'd swathed himself in previously he'd found other stars with the determination to help him reach once more for the life he wanted. He was glad of this much though he couldn't be certain Haknyeon was meeting the same sort of friends. 

As far as Hyunmin could tell Haknyeon's experience of the vastness of the galaxy was confined to childish imagination and forgotten once he was too old to fritter away his days shirking his duties. There was no telling the sort of trouble he could have naively stumbled into. As much as Hyunmin wanted to believe otherwise he had known the grittier reaches of the galaxy long before he knew the pastures on the other side of this planet. Smugglers never usually came in such friendly varieties as Pristin. It was even more likely that Pristin were the only ones like that, too selfless to think of themselves over someone they'd taken as an enemy. 

There were so many enemies to different causes around that Hyunmin wasn't sure whether he'd trust Haknyeon to be able to avoid them all. He was a human from a planet that didn't exist on several maps of the galaxy. Just because Hyunmin was struggling to reach him it didn't mean that general trouble was afforded the same penalties. 

Hyunmin sighed. He supposed that the stormtroopers were allowing him their shades of kindness in letting him give up his own freedom. The smiles were enough for Hyunmin to know he'd been living on the luck of too many others. 

“My name is Hyunmin. I am originally of Corellia but I have lived here on Lothal for several years now.”

CH-111 frowned and turned to their associates to say, “I thought he just arrived on the Aloha though?”

The shushing came too late from KZ-00 and JY-315 looked resigned to their efforts to catch Hyunmin being caught like this. Or so Hyunmin thought until KZ-00 offered firm sincerity in a smile. “Hyunmin, we're going to give you the ability to disappear for good.”

 

As much as KZ-00’s words sounded like a threat Hyunmin was still baffled by the possibility he found yet more good fortune. He was taken to kiosk not far from the back alley where he ate with JY-315. It was small and cluttered but it was, as far as Hyunmin was aware, private. 

CH-111 had Hyunmin sit on the visiting side of a desk and offered him a drink whilst everyone else got themselves situated. There were introductions (“just call her Kazoo, it's easier”) and corrections (“do not under any circumstances call me Kazoo instead of Eunbi”) and even the beginnings of an explanation. 

“The Aloha is gone. The, uh, ‘traders’ who came here on the starship are gone with it.” CH-111 also went by the name Chaeyeon when off duty and there was something settling about that alone even though Hyunmin knew he should have been keeping his guard up around these people. But having these stormtroopers open up to Hyunmin was almost enough to get him to trust them until he considered the information. 

“How do you know?” Hyunmin asked. A moment later an equally burning thought occurred to him. “Are they all alive?”

“We're so far on the fringes of the galaxy that we don't have to stress over uprisings and insurgence against our patrols,” Eunbi explained delicately. There was hesitation in her tone and it must have been from knowing the history of the Empire’s presence on Lothal. 

Hyunmin felt defensive about it himself without really being as native to the planet he felt. These stormtroopers could have been stationed here since before Hyunmin crashed an X-wing onto a farm yet he felt more legitimate belonging than he felt for those who wore the anonymous uniforms which razed the planet and subjugated any dissent among the miserable civilians. He'd heard of the riots where ringleaders were swiftly dispatched by the military winter from Haknyeon's family (though never Haknyeon himself who appeared baffled by mentions of the time) and it wasn't difficult to link that with these uniformed troopers who were claiming friendliness. 

But Hyunmin was wearing the uniform too. Whether genuine or not he looked the same as the people who must still have stuck fear into those who remembered. Right now he was no different to them. He had to accept their summary of the present and hope their impact was nothing that couldn’t be repaired by years of calm. But an assurance like that could just have easily have been a diversion. 

“Does not even being on maps guarantee Pristin still live?”

Eunbi looked over at Chaeyeon before she responded. “Rather than guaranteeing something like that it is just pointing out how we don’t have to abide by rules quite so strictly. Almost as though a place like this doesn’t matter. How else could a deal like that be struck and passed off so easily? It’s something of an open secret.”

Chaeyeon was prompted by Hyunmin’s incomprehension and added, “In a way we’re all associates. We’ve never travelled with them and we’ve never directly had contact but they're allies. We follow the rules closely enough to convince external surveillance and we get to do whatever we want. If the empire is wasteful enough that they don't notice the redistribution of credits who are we to ignore that?”

“What you're saying is you're corrupt?” Hyunmin filled in. Chaeyeon didn't look happy with that but Eunbi didn't let her pout over it for long. 

“Corrupt or not you and your friends get to live to see another day. Shouldn't that be good enough?”

It should have been so Hyunmin decided to stop questioning it. Things like the tedium if duty being ignored by stormtroopers was enough to facilitate Hyunmin’s survival so far. He was allowed to live with his lie about knowing Haknyeon prior to his arrival and the stormtroopers years ago had looked the other way and allowed willful ignorance to convince them that Hyunmin wasn't the rebel pilot who crashed an X-wing. Ennui towards the empire was the luck which carried Hyunmin this far and he was hoping it was enough to sweep Haknyeon back to him when he worked out a way of searching every quadrant of the galaxy. 

“So what’s happening here? Are you helping me?”

Yuri, the small and sleepy JY-315, shrugged her shoulders. “What do you need help with?”

There were several things of varying import that Hyunmin needed help with but he wasn’t sure that these stormtroopers would or could assist with that. The main priority was of course to find Haknyeon but something had been bothering him since leaving Doreen. He was closer to the possibility that Haknyeon wasn’t anywhere easy to reach. He wasn’t on Corellia, a notion low in his gut was enough to ascertain that, so returning to the planet where he had been born wouldn’t yield the result he’d want. Haknyeon wasn’t anywhere Hyunmin would be able to find with or without the assistance of strangers. 

Part of Hyunmin simply wanted to return home. He wanted everything to be as he remembered it without being sullied by the fine soot in the air which followed from Corellia. He wanted to return to the farm untouched by anything which remembered the core worlds. But he couldn’t face the place without Haknyeon or even KT-GZ. Another part of Hyunmin was worried about the home he had before Corellia. His own parents were people he no longer knew or belonged with and he friends who had become his family after that were even more distant than them. 

Eunki had done so much for Hyunmin, given him the chance for excitement and adventure, pulled him towards a cause and a purpose to keep going.

Way before Hyunmin confessed to Wontak that he hated the very notion of having to get in the cockpit of his X-wing day after day he had craved a purpose in his life. He wanted to see the stars and feel like his life was even close to being important in the universe and Eunki was the person who gave that to him. Eunki talked him into getting on a ship which pierced the atmosphere and moving to live with him with like-minded individuals. 

Eunki gave Hyunmin everything, credits and clothes and everything that could fill up all the spaces he never knew he had in his heart. Hyunmin belonged, with his friends as equally as he belonged to them. As much as Hyunmin knew he owed them all so much he knew that he couldn’t go back. Living had been a betrayal when he should have ceased to exist in retribution for deserting and endangering a friend and it had been an even bigger betrayal when he hadn’t wanted to give up all of his life to be with them again. 

Even if Hyunmin would never pay them back for all they had done for him, they would never have what they were owed from him, he still had the important things they had given to him. The answer to get whatever and wherever he wanted was a simple one. Get into a ship. He could do anything at all from the cockpit of a ship. 

“If I was a person who needed help,” Hyunmin said carefully, “I would need help getting a ship. I just need to be able to fly and I will manage from there.”

“I don’t know if we can stretch to a ship,” Eunbi said slowly. She exchanged a look with a concerned Chaeyeon and added, “But we will know someone who can help. Pristin were determined to help to the extent that they shan’t be allowed to fly their registered ships to this  system. We can’t let that go to waste.”

Hyunmin was acutely aware that everyone he had met had been far too kind to him. He’d gotten away with so much and he’d been given so much more by smugglers and traders and now even stormtroopers. And he wasn’t going to start turning help down now. 

Eunbi didn’t get Hyunmin a ship but she manages a travel permit for HY-1945. The false stormtrooper came to life more easily with the support of superiors and colleagues who claimed to have trained alongside the soldier.

Hyunmin gripped his blaster as he walked in step with Chaeyeon. This was fine. It was his duty as a stormtrooper to patrol so there was no need to fret about anyone seeing through the uniform and seeing him for the imposter he was. He’d rested and been fed properly at the small trooper outpost in the town and even though he’d been given ill-fitting clothing to insulate the layer between his skin and the plastoid armour it was something clean that made him think that maybe he could succeed in the deceit and find his way home. 

He only had to complete a patrol today and convince enough civilians and troopers that he belonged among them. He was trying his hardest but Chaeyeon didn’t agree. 

“You’re so stiff,” she laughed. The sound was uncanny when filtered through the helmet and Hyunmin had to wonder whether it was more unsettling because he’d never seen a uniformed trooper laugh like this before. 

Obviously Hyunmin knew that despite the conditioning and training the stormtroopers were all people too and the process which drew out the ruthless and merciless sides of them wouldn’t entirely kill off emotions such as compassion or delight but it was still odd. He tried to imagine Chaeyeon’s face in place of the unfeeling plastoid visor but he was still too used to his own training. It was difficult to lose the sense that even when Hyunmin was wearing the same uniform he was simply a complicit victim of the murderous blizzard. Soon even these pretended friends would have him realise he was never to trust anyone who didn’t make claims of laying his life down before their own just as the people he had run away from had. 

Chaeyeon hadn’t put her life on the line, and neither had Eunbi or Yuri but their assistance was getting Hyunmin home. Even with the forged pass which granted him passage on official state transport, Hyunmin had to wonder whether he was only borrowing trust lended out by the risks taken by the likes of Yuha and Eunwoo and Rena at the academy.

It was another price he’d have to pay but Hyunmin found that he didn’t resent it. He only wanted to have the chance to be able to pay it back and see that the people who offered him help hadn’t done so at the detriment of their lives. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> updates will be fortnightly!!!! (however for arbitrary reasons i wanted to make the first post today so the fortnightly thing won't actually take effect until the first actual chapter next week) i also still might condense the chapter count somehow we'll see.


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